The Taste of Memory: Food and Gardens Have Taken Marion Halligan to Some Surprising Places . .

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Author: Marion Halligan

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TasteofMemory24-6-04

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The Taste of Memory


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The Taste of Memory Marion Halligan

A Sue Hines Book

Allen & Unwin


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Author photograph courtesy of The Canberra Times. First published in 2004 Copyright © Marion Halligan 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. A Sue Hines Book Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Halligan, marion. The taste of memory. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 312 8. 1. Halligan, Marion, 1940–. 2. Food writers – Australia – Biography. I. Title. 641.092 Edited by Caroline Williamson Text design and typesetting by Pauline Haas Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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To b el o v e d f r i e n d s, n a m e d a n d u n n a m e d ; may we enjoy lots more eating and drinking and talking


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‘ Th e n y o u s h o u l d s a y w h a t y o u m e a n ,’ t h e M a rch H a re w e n t o n . ‘ I d o,’ A l i c e h a s t i ly re p l i e d ; ‘ a t l e a s t — a t l e a s t I m e a n w h a t I s a y — t h a t ’s t h e s a m e t h i n g, y o u k n ow.’ ‘ N o t t h e s a m e t h i n g a b i t ! ’ s a i d t h e H a t t e r. ‘ Why, y o u m i g h t j u s t a s w el l s a y t h a t “ I s e e w h a t I e a t ” i s t h e s a m e t h i n g as “I eat what I see!”’


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Contents On the bone |1 T a l e s o f t w o c i t i e s | 13 W h a t s h a l l w e h a v e f o r d i n n e r ? . . . s u m m e r | 27 D e s i r e a n d d i s c o n t e n t | 45 S a i l i n g o n s h i p s | 61 P a s s a g e s o f t i m e | 69 S w e e t m e a t s | 85 N o v e l f o o d | 93 F a m i n e a n d f e a s t , f a t , f l e s h a n d f a s t | 105 P a s s a g e s o f t i m e | 125 W h a t s h a l l w e h a v e f o r d i n n e r ? . . . w i n t e r | 141 R e p u b l i c s o f p l e a s u r e | 157 A s u f f i c i e n t l y e x c i t i n g o c c u p a t i o n | 169 T h e t a s t e o f m e m o r y | 191 K e e p i n g h i m o u t o f t h e p u b | 203 L u m i n o u s m o m e n t s | 213 S t r a w b e r r i e s a t m i d n i g h t | 223 P a s s a g e s o f t i m e | 235 N o v e l s , p h i l o s o p h y a n d a p r i c o t j a m | 247 T h e s o n s o f h e a v e n | 251

B i b l i o g r a p h y | 271 I n d e x | 273


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On the bone

Before I became a novelist I used to write about food. In an ephemeral and journalistic sort of way, for newspapers and magazines. When I first started trying to do this, my husband, being a perfectionist in his own work, was a bit worried. What if it isn’t good enough, he said. What if nobody wants to read it? And anyway, hasn’t it been done before? Well, in journalism most things have been done before. They come round in cycles, with perhaps a contemporary spin, maybe not even that; the longer you live the more often you see the repetitions. But in fact what I was doing hadn’t been done before, then. There were plenty of recipes around, but I was interested in stories as well, in words and their meanings, in histories and anecdotes, in food as a conversation that people had with one another. I wrote at first for Epicurean, in the days when it couldn’t afford to be coloured and glossy, and had wonderful strange black and white photographs that may have involved food but not in any edible way. I did an article for Quadrant in the seventies which was shaped as a lament for the absence of any philosophical writing about food, ‘the ethos, the essence, and the idea of eating well’, but was mainly about restaurant reviewers, dividing them into three categories: critics, sycophants and pedestrians. In those days a lot of restaurant reviews told you about


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2 | The taste of memory

how we all went down to Bill Pancetta’s marvellous new place and he plied us with half the dishes on the menu and delicious they were et cetera, and it was obvious that Bill was a terrific buddy and that there was nothing at all professional or anonymous about the account of his establishment. Quadrant changed ‘sycophants’ to ‘friends’ which I thought was very wimpy of them, but I could understand their point, I did name names and it is a litigious trade. Interesting that they didn’t censor pedestrians. Here is the last paragraph of that article. It makes me smile a bit now, and with a certain embarrassment, at the tone of it, so severe, so pontificating. I’m glad I have since found a friendlier voice. But I understand what I was up to, I was young, this was the first time I had been published in what I perceived was a serious intellectual journal like Quadrant, I was determined to achieve an appropriate gravitas. And I am not at all apologetic about the sentiments; they are exactly how I feel today, how I feel about this book, any book about food: Writing about food is not a totally satisfactory activity. It has too many intimations of decadence, in a world where so often the mere presence of food is such an event that the consideration of its elegance would be an obscenity. The only justification of our preoccupation with food is that, since we do eat a great deal, we should do it well. A basic function, which takes up so much of our time, should if it is not to be disgusting, become an art. Similarly, writing about food is only justifiable if it too is done well, if it too becomes an art. In a lot of cases we have succeeded in raising the preparation of food to such a level, but a well-made piece of writing on the subject is a much rarer phenomenon. Not at all chatty, you’d have to say, but true.


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Later I did a weekly column for the Canberra Times with the title ‘Eat My Words’, which gave me the name for the book I published in 1990, and which is the one of all the sixteen I have written that people most often ask me about. Alas, like most back-list books, it is out of print. How did I get interested in food? I always was, I think. Greed, might be one reason. The fact that when I was a child we never got quite enough to eat. Or not that exactly, rather that we never got to eat as much as we would have chosen. No magic cut-and-come-again puddings, no second helpings. Perhaps I should not say never but hardly ever. But food was rare enough, and precious, not to be taken for granted. At the same time it was often quite boring, and when I began to read my mother’s Women’s Weeklys I got interested in the vision they offered of food as something varied, interesting, exotic, amusing. When I came to write Eat My Words I realised that my awakening to food, in those postwar years when rationing and austerity gradually gave way to plenty, was of much the same pattern as the country’s. That as I learned, so did Australia. Of course I see no causal connection here; it was an accident of my age, of being born when I was. But one of the best things anybody said to me about the book was by a woman who came from Kalgoorlie. She loved it, she said, it was exactly her childhood, her growing up, she recognised her life in it. The first chapter was called ‘From Castor to Olive in One Generation’, which related how for me as a child oil was castor and a cure for all ills that was so absolutely frightful a punishment that the mere mention of it got you better instantly. A child too sick to go to school could be miraculously restored to health by the prospect of castor oil. But by the time I was barely grown oil was olive and utterly delicious. And there were the olives themselves. And garlic. In Newcastle I had a boyfriend called Lionel who gave me a cookbook for my birthday. French cooking it was. I still make its recipe for


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onion soup. Then I came to Canberra to the Australian National University and lived in Bruce Hall, where all meals were included. Lunch was buffet, but dinner was served to the table on large platters. It was a good idea to try to sit near the end they arrived at, otherwise if the greedy scholarship boys got in first they’d grab everything. This was in the last days of Oxbridge-in-the-Antipodes, when we said grace in Latin and wore gowns to dinner and High Table promenaded in at the last minute. Except Saturday night which was informal and when we had steak since a lot of people went out that night. Tough steak, and overcooked, and kept warm in a bain-marie, but we were supposed to be grateful for the idea. I was in Canberra to do an MA which I never actually did finish partly because it was about Shakespeare and I got stuck in the reading. Nobody told me just to read Shakespeare’s plays and not the five million books about him in the university library and so I got overwhelmed. I’d wanted to do something on Australian little magazines which could have been a useful piece of scholarship, Alec Hope was to have been my supervisor but he couldn’t or I think wouldn’t do it. Twenty-five years later he launched my first novel, Self Possession, and made a speech in which he said he’d realised early on in my association with him that I was not a born scholar, which seemed as if it was going to be a difficult thing to hear on this occasion, but then he went on to say that he had not however realised I was a born writer. Which was a lovely thing to say and quite possibly he meant it, he was not known for mincing words, and indeed there is a story that somebody whose book he reviewed harshly committed suicide. He is famous for saying that Patrick White wrote ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. Later, being a naturally optimistic sort of person, I decided that it was lucky I never did finish that MA, I might have become an academic and I don’t think that is a good path to becoming a novelist. It is better not to be scholarly when you write fiction, you need to learn to trust


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your imagination. Sometimes people say of my books, is that true, is that a fact, did that really happen? And I reply, Well, my character thinks it did. I’m not responsible if he’s got it wrong. But Bruce Hall: I moved out because I got sick of living in a public institution, however luxurious. I wanted to have my own place and do my own cooking. Just before I did this I met my husband, who had newly come to Canberra to a lectureship in the French department and was staying in hall until a flat became available. We were a bit nervous about being isolated in our separate flats, and exchanged addresses. I invited him to dinner in mine; I did have a flatmate but she was away somewhere. It was mostly a double garage under an enormous Red Hill house, very far out it seemed, a long way from the city, cold, draughty, with a concrete floor and a small rug with a dining table and chairs in the middle of echoing space, not made any cosier by strange shrouded shapes around the walls. This was in the days of housing shortages and subsidised rents for public servants who’d had the good sense to marry before they arrived, which meant landlords could charge astronomical prices. The tiny kitchen was also the laundry for upstairs. A very bad arrangement as I would have dinner parties and not do the washing up, and the landlady would come down early in the morning thinking she could do her laundry and find the place stacked with the debris of my dinners. I have always been much more interested in cooking than cleaning up. I want to be a television chef with unseen fairies whisking all the used pots away. And of course being a double garage so cold I caught pneumonia and went on my honeymoon with a rash from a penicillin allergy. But that was later. Graham was my first dinner party. I remember one of the dishes I cooked was called Ghivech, from a book I had bought at a sale. It was a kind of vegetable stew, Romanian, you put a whole lot of vegetables in a dish with chicken stock and cooked them for an hour and a half. It


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was nice but I remember a slight doubt about it, and now I see why, that’s a ludicrously long cooking time for diced potatoes even, let alone cabbage and beans and peas and zucchini. It was extremely mushy, with little colour or texture, even if the flavour was good. I got pretty French in my recipes, after that, probably only partly for Graham’s sake. Graham was annoyed with himself for failing to bring a bottle of wine. How could he have not done so, he berated himself, he’d been overseas for five years, in Cambridge and then in Paris, he’d been a student but that didn’t mean not drinking wine. He didn’t imply any reproach of me for not providing it, the wine was his job. I had most of a bottle of Penfold’s cooking wine which was not very good but had cost four shillings and sixpence, an enormous amount of money for bad wine, I could have got a whole flagon of delicious plonk for less than that. But anyway we had a glass of it. That was in my still fairly teetotal days, before I learnt to drink wine. Shortly after that he bought a car so he could come and visit me; Red Hill was the end of the earth in those days and the buses hopeless, mostly we walked from Manuka. I remember realising at twenty to five one Friday afternoon that I had no money or prospect of getting any over the weekend (young people can’t imagine how difficult life was before ATMs, not to mention credit cards) and running all the way down to Manuka, fortunately it was down, from Red Hill, to get to the bank at about a minute to five. I took out some money and was about to set off home, uphill this time, when Graham came past in the VW, coming to visit me, so that all ended very nicely. How lovely, to have a car to ourselves and be able to go wherever we wanted. I can’t remember what we did, but we passed a good evening, probably mainly talking, though we may have gone to the continental cinema in Queanbeyan which was the only place you could see foreign films. I do remember the happiness of our companionship. And those first


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tentative steps towards couplehood, when you think, this is good, maybe it is going to keep on going? Maybe, possibly, perhaps, there is a pattern being set here? And that was the beginning of a whole life together, a whole life of food and conversation. Of going shopping together, or me coming home with little parcels of goodies, and Graham always delighted, opening a bottle of wine to go with them, discussing how they would be cooked, what we would eat them with. Every day he would ring me from work: was there anything he could get, anything he should buy, had I forgotten anything? He wasn’t a great giver of flowers, but he loved bringing home interesting bottles of wine to try. We never argued on the phone, or got cross with one another, as though this line connecting us could have nothing to do with life’s ordinary vicissitudes. Once I said to Graham that I wondered what would have happened had I married an engineer and gone to Saudi Arabia, instead of a medievalist who took me to France. What would I have written about then? Would I have got interested in putting food into words? He was disturbed by this. He did not at all like the idea that I might have become a drastically different person by marrying someone else. But in those days and probably still to an extent women’s lives were shaped by the professions of the men they married. Maybe now sometimes men’s are shaped by their wives’. And of course the person we become owes a lot to our spouse. But I think a lot of life is much more accidental than we give it credit for being. Small choices, let alone large ones like the person you marry, can set things going in different directions. I think I would have been interested in food and cooking and the idea of it whoever I’d married, but there’s no doubt that a number of sabbaticals in France, usually a year long, helped. Especially as we didn’t have much money, and had to be thrifty, and live like the locals, and I did have enough French to go to the markets and shop quite successfully. Though I could get into muddles.


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Once I was at the market in Suresnes which is a suburb of Paris with Graham and some colleagues and our children, we were newly arrived and I was shopping for the first time, on this occasion but also the first time ever in France, Jane and Colin were showing us around. I asked for half a kilo of liver pâté. The woman looked stunned. She measured out a huge chunk with her knife and grinned at me. Jane came to the rescue. It was a matter of vocabulary. One didn’t ask for weight, one asked for un morceau, a morsel. The woman would then put her knife at some arbitrary spot on the pâté or terrine or cheese or whatever and you would say, yes, or no; more, or less, making your own chopping gesture with your hand. So you bought the amount by eye, knowing how much you wanted by the look. Whenever I went to the market after that, the woman, red-checked and round and made even rounder by the layers of clothes she was wearing against the cold, would shout, A kilo of pâté de foie for madame? And roar with laughter.

* Late in the eighties I was on a panel at the Melbourne Festival, I think it was called Spoleto in those days, with a publisher. The panel was called ‘My companion had the veal’. I talked about different ways of writing about food, how recipe books had changed, the role that coloured pictures played in the presentation of dishes. Why didn’t I write a book about it, the publisher said. And there was Eat My Words. I soon realised Graham would have to be in it. He was so much part of the narrative, he had to be named. He wasn’t very keen, being a private person, but recognised the necessity. What shall I call you, I said. I’m certainly not going to say my husband and I, in the fashion of our queen. He didn’t want to be called by his own name, not then, not at all. The initial G seemed pompous and pointless. Well, I said, what about if I call you Cosmo. He liked that, said Yes. Cosmo was one of the names we talked about for calling our son.


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Along with Orlando. I don’t think they were ever much more than fantastical. Though I still think Orlando would have been good. Orlando Halligan: it has a ring. James is appalled by this. In fact nothing makes him shudder quite so much as the small slip of paper in the Pan Book of Boys’ Names, with its list of possible names for our new son. I dare not repeat them here. He considers he had a lucky escape. He could do push-ups at several hours old, or at least turn himself in his crib from one side to the other, and pulled off his nametag, those clever plastic bracelets that can only be removed by cutting away, so he had to have another. I still have this ripped off label with Baby Halligan on it. Did they muddle him with another child, you might wonder. No. No doubt. But it took a while to decide a name for him. Even a new baby has a personality, the name has to fit; maybe we thought Orlandos don’t drag off name tags. Whereas with Lucy there was no problem. I said to Graham once, in the VW in Manuka days, he’d parked at the shops but we were sitting having a conversation, What do you think of Lucy for a girl’s name? Oh yes, I like that, he said, and so there we were. Never any question, and fortunately as soon as we looked at her we knew she was a Lucy. Lucy Beatrice. When she was born one of the nuns in Graham’s class pointed out we’d named her after two child martyrs. Thus are the narratives of a life made. Anyway, Cosmo got its run, as the name of my spouse in Eat My Words, and then in Cockles of the Heart. And several dedications in books. But by this time Graham didn’t much care for being Cosmo. Was quite grumpy about it in fact. Cosmo somehow became something he was offended by. Thought he was an awful ponce, instead of being an appellation he could hide behind. So now as I write he is himself, Graham, and I don’t know what he would think of that. Like everything else, now he has died, I have to make the choice, make the decision. I can think about what he might have wanted, but it is I who have to work it out, finally, on my own.


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10 | T h e t a s t e o f m e m o r y

I’ve been thinking too about Cosmo, and have only recently worked out what made Graham uncomfortable. It was my book The Fog Garden that clarified it for me. This is a novel, it owes a lot to the events of my life but it is still a work of fiction. I needed fiction to be frank in a way I never could have been in a memoir. The main character is a woman called Clare, who is very like me but isn’t me. I think Graham thought that Cosmo was not him, he was a character in a book, very like him but other, not somebody he liked particularly. I don’t think anything can be done about this; whenever a person is put in a book, however truthfully his story is told, he still somehow becomes a character, not himself. That goes for the most strict of biographies. I wish I’d realised at the time, and could have reassured Graham that this was a simple literary phenomenon. I knew I wanted Eat My Words to be a book about food, not just recipes but stories, the kind of thing readers could enjoy without feeling it was mainly a catalogue of recipes they were failing to cook; food as idea and history and travel and above all words. But it wasn’t till it came back from the printer, a real book, between covers, not a manuscript, that I realised it was also an autobiography. A lot of writers don’t know what their book’s about until it comes in this finished form, the form that others will read; then they go through it and think, Oh, so that’s what I was doing. This may sound a bit fey and even ditsy, but it is part of the mysterious process of writing books. It isn’t a straightforward chronological autobiography, but my life is the spine of it, the skeleton, what gives its flesh shape and holds it together. And all cooks know that meat tastes better on the bone. That’s where the real flavour comes from. This book isn’t Eat My Words. It is another set of stories of my life in food, and travel, and especially gardens, these nourishing spaces that we like to surround ourselves with. I am older now, and sadder. That married life which began with such shyly burgeoning hopes ended in


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anguish, as all long marriages, all long partnerships, will, must, in the death of the beloved other. As we were warned at the very beginning: Till death do us part, we said blithely. Of course we knew we were not immortal, but somehow we did not believe it. I have known the strange energetic erotic excitements of grief, and written a book about them. But the space between the hope and the anguish was luminous with passing moments, and life still is. And I still think that eating and drinking and talking with beloved friends is the most wonderful thing in the world. I shall never tire of it. This book is an invitation to some good eating and pleasant drinking and lots and lots of conversation ...


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Tales of two cities

I grew up in Newcastle, that well-kept secret of a city, and—this begins to look like a predilection—have spent the rest of my life in Canberra, another well-kept secret, with bouts in Paris, which is anything but, or so you might think. I have just spent some time again in Newcastle. I used to go very often when my parents were alive, and occasionally when my son was living there, but then not so much. This time I was curating a permanent exhibition for the Newcastle Regional Museum, a marvellous gig, which involved walking through the storerooms and coming up with a theme round which to organise objects from the museum’s collections. I was asked because the director had read my novel Lovers’ Knots, which is set in Newcastle, in fact the city is a character in it, and thought I would be a good person to do a human kind of display, rather than something blokey, to do with steel or coal or industrial activity. And I realised that museums are very like novels: the objects in them are an answer to the question which good novels always pose, the question: How shall we live? And all the various forms of that: How do we achieve the good life? What makes life worth living? How might we express ourselves? How can we broaden our lives? How give meaning and comfort to them?


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The objects that people valued, that gave meaning and shape to their lives, provide some very interesting answers to these questions. Imagine, an enormous chased and engraved silver cup, for choral singing. A wooden chair, like a throne, a bardic chair, for reciting in Welsh. Little gold medals to hang on a watchchain, for soccer, rowing, and, again, singing. Less surprising, but poignant, is women’s handiwork: a lace baby’s bonnet, a net milk jug cover edged with points of the most intricate beading, embroidered petticoats, a strange grey lumpy object that turns out to be a bustle. When I was fossicking about among these frail treasures I stayed at Noah’s on the Beach, which is on a point of land looking down the coast, across the sea and the sand. I always ask for the view this side which costs quite a bit more. Though the view the other way, across the harbour, is spectacular. There is Fort Scratchley, lit up at night, looking like a great vessel entering the port; it was built in the nineteenth century to intercept a Russian invasion which was supposed to capture Sydney and rob its banks. There are the stepped rows of terraces with their massive plentiful Georgian chimneys—they look Georgian though some are probably Victorian Georgian, there is a time lag in the antipodes—these days cosseted, painted, restored, with some new ones slipped in, not quite perfectly camouflaged. It’s a roofscape, steep and shallow, shingled, corrugated, tiled. And then, the bond stores like Florentine palaces. The breakwater and man-made Stockton with the industries beyond, the Bight flat and glittering and the knowledge of all the ships wrecked and sunk beneath its waters, the lines of Norfolk Island pines marking the mental hospital, the distant high curve of the bridge. The skyline is low, with the occasional fan of a pine tree against it. A busy view, full of incident. The town my father was brought to, when he was eight, in 1912, in the hope that it would save him from dying of tuberculosis, like his brother. The town my mother and her mother and grandmother were born in.


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But I love the view the other way, the sea. Standing on the balcony, leaning on the rail, just watching the immemorial inexorable movement of the breakers washing into the shore. My house in Canberra looks out into a small enclosed garden, with big trees sheltering it, it is highly wrought and suburban, not elemental, like the sea. I think pleasant suburbs are a wonderful thing, I believe suburbia is one of the great achievements of the human spirit, but sometimes I want elemental. At Noah’s I lay in bed in the morning listening to the surf and thinking how well I’d slept, wondering if when you’ve grown up by the sea always this sound takes you back to that untroubled (though you did not know it then) childhood time when sleep was always available, and maybe I should never have gone away, maybe I would always sleep so innocently, cocooned in the sound of the waves. And when I stood on the balcony and looked at the water and the sky and the bulky headlands I thought, why don’t I live here any more? Of course, I know why. I cannot afford to live at Noah’s. Nor in one of the new apartments for anything up to a million dollars with their water glimpses, supposing I wanted that kind of pseudo-glamorous battery housing. Nor where I grew up. When I was born my parents kept a little general shop, a mixed business, in Adamstown. My father told me what a heartbreaking job it was, opening early, staying late, hoping for the going-to-work crowd, the after-the-pictures mob. The lettuces were an emblem of the heartbreak. He’d go to the market and buy lovely crisp ones, and put them on display. Nobody showed any interest. Eventually, days later, someone would come in: Got any lettuces? Oh, they look a bit tired, don’t they. And they wouldn’t buy them. And then there was nothing to do with sad lettuces but throw them out. He got hold of some second-hand books and ran a lending library. A lot of work in that and not much money. Once some gypsies came in and offered to bless his wallet. He was suspicious, but they might be


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customers, he didn’t want to be rude, so he held it tightly while they crossed it with silver. But still, when they’d gone and he looked in it, the money was missing. How had they done that? My parents would take it in turns to mind me and the shop. They hardly got to speak to one another. Finally they decided that working eighteen hours a day was no life for a family so when I was two my father got a job as an accounts clerk at the State Dockyard and they bought a house at Merewether. It was in Berner Street, just round the bend from the beach, backing on to broad sweeps of sandhills, and they bought it off the plan, so we lived for a while with my grandparents in Watkin Street, in a house with a well that they filled in, in case I slipped in and drowned. But of course I don’t remember this, it’s a story I have been told. The home I remember is the Berner Street house, so near the beach, backing on to the sandhills. It didn’t occur to me at the time how privileged we were to grow up so close to the sea. Though its presence in our lives was a powerful one. My mother’s brothers and sisters all lived within stone’s throws— so they liked to say, and I imagined strong men heaving stones large distances—and the women would take walks to visit one another, passing by the sea and reporting on its state. Wild today. Pretty rough.

Horrible westerly, flat as a pancake. The sand’s all washed away again. You should see the foam, it’s like snow. As if the sea was a god whose mood was endlessly significant. The bush wasn’t far away, for picnics and blackberrying. But the sandhills over the back were out of bounds. Dangerous places. Dirty. Not for little girls. We were disobedient. The great towering hills were such fun to gallop down. We reached terrific speeds and I reckon it was a consciousness-altering experience. One day I cut myself on a shard of glass, a great gash over my big toe, masses of blood. I hurried home and put it under the front tap. My mother looked at it, the blood still


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gushing. How did you do that, she asked. Oh, I was just, around, I muttered. She knew I was lying. You’ve been on the sandhills, she said. I was five, and amazed she could tell this. But I could see that the wound was punishment for wickedness. A reminder even now—I’ve still got the scar. But in usual human fashion, I don’t think I stopped galloping down the sandhills. And wandering all over the suburb. Playing on the old railway line, climbing though dark lantana-choked culverts underneath it, terrifying ourselves with talk of the bogeyman that lived under there. Climbing the vertical sea cliffs in bare feet. Going swimming as soon as the weather was warm enough, spending all day in the sun, getting burned to a crisp (sunblock unheard of, and coconut oil an impossible luxury, which was probably lucky), suffering agonies until the skin peeled off in great sheets and we were tanned and right for the rest of the season. Doing the same thing again next year. What a horror story this is now. But I don’t seem to have been harmed by it. I’d have liked to live in a house with roses and big trees. Not much chance of that with the scouring sea winds. Now of course I know how idyllic it was. The house not very big, but it did have position, position, position. Two bedrooms and a narrow laundry out the back which had been turned into a tiny bedroom, just wide enough for a single bed, with a bookcase hung on the wall, which I sometimes imagined falling on me in the night. There was a lounge room, which we occasionally used, mainly when we had visitors, and a dining room, with the fire, a Victorian patent grate it was, small but hot, the room big enough for a sofa and comfortable chairs as well as the table, where we sat at night reading, I particularly remember the silence, a rich vibrating kind of silence, of four then five people, reading. Or doing homework. For a while there were severe blackouts, and then we sat around the table peering at our books in the soft yellow light of the oil lamp. Sometimes my father would bring out a small paper bag with sweets he’d bought on the way home from work, rocky road or coconut ice, and we would


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be allowed one piece. This was his indulgence; he didn’t drink wine or beer, and meals were modest, but he had a sweet tooth. When I was quite small he would buy two bottles of beer and a dozen of soft drink, for Christmas, only at Christmas, and he and my mother would drink shandies. But after a while it was just soft drink, fizzy lemonade, ginger beer, creaming soda, orange, lime; we’d take it in turns to choose. I can still remember the excitement of that yearly treat. It was especially good on winter nights with the fire lit, making toast. A lot of people don’t seem to know that toast made on an open fire doesn’t work with flames. You have to wait till they die down, until there are glowing embers, then you thread your toasting fork through the bread and hold it out, not too close, so it turns slowly golden. Then it’s lashings of butter. Nothing else, the delicious hot slightly smoky crispy bread and the butter. My sisters and I, inheriting it, sold that house. How stupid we were. I knew that at the time. One of us wanted the money and the other two should have bought her out. But I had just stopped work and was planning to try to live as a writer, I did not dare risk a mortgage. Two kilometres from town, a couple of hundred metres from the beach. Position. But Newcastle was such an ordinary place, houses were cheap, we didn’t get much for it.

* In my schoolteaching days I gave an exercise to a senior class, to write an essay on the subject of Christmas being a winter festival, and that we in the antipodes should celebrate it at the appropriate time of the year, with much rich feasting to mark the fact that the days are getting longer, that winter is on the way out after all. A good proportion of my students had not been born in Australia, a number of them were from the northern hemisphere, but not one of


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them supported my thesis. Every one of them said, no, what a terrible idea, Christmas is a summer festival. They all associated it with long sunny summer days, with water and swimming, with picnics and freedom. They weren’t worried about the inappropriateness of all that heavy food in the middle of summer: they didn’t eat it. Most of them knew little about its Christian significance, and nothing at all of its pagan origins. And I see that my most poignant Christmas memory is a summer one. In Newcastle, the year that my mother died. My sisters and I were clearing out the family home, ready to sell it, and our husbands and children came for a last celebration in the old house at Merewether. Our mother had died five months before, and we were getting used to the idea that the family was us, that there was no longer a parent to make us still of the generation of children. The death of one parent doesn’t make you an orphan, but however old you are the death of the other parent does. I was very conscious of having been orphaned when my mother died. Even though she was frail and vague and needed us to look after her. Physically the roles were reversed, but not psychologically, I was still her child. The thing about being an orphan—and it’s compounded by being a widow—is that there is no one who knows you, thoroughly, lovingly, from your earliest years. This is nothing to do with loss of identity, not knowing who you are. It is the terrible solitude of no one knowing you, deep down, long ago. And imagine if you were in another country, with none of the friends of your youth. I remember the marvellous hymns of my Methodist childhood, so many of them about God knowing us. Wanting God to step in when the world fails. That is what is behind the fall of the sparrow story, the sparrows worth so little they are sold in the market for a farthing, yet God sees and marks each one that falls; it tells us that no creature is too insignificant to be known, and known about, by God. This is why I think growing up and growing older


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becomes so melancholy, it is full of intimations of our deep irrevocable solitude. Some people are better than others at learning to care for it. I am lucky to have sisters whom I love dearly and love to see, and part of that is the repository of shared memories. Though when I wrote Lovers’ Knots some of which is a partly invented family history they kept saying, Was it really like that? I don’t remember that. I’m sure you’re wrong about that. Yes, definitely wrong about that. And they are younger than me so they don’t recall my childhood at all well, and certainly they have some pretty funny ideas of what I was like, and quite false ones about how I behaved. Nevertheless, we take great pleasure in reminiscing, and at times reconstruct a past that we can all agree on. But this memoir is just up to me, they can write their own. It is Christmas in Newcastle and the family home is full of family. We moved the big dining table into the garden, under the shade of the pohutukawas that I had given my parents for Christmas the year I was eighteen; a tree their size is a rare thing in this wind-scoured seaside suburb. I went to a nursery and asked what would grow. I’d given up on roses, but not trees. Now, nearly thirty years later, they were big and shady. The weather was superb, sunny and dry but not too hot. There was always a sea breeze gently blowing the scents of salt to mix with the smell of frangipani and the soft soothing roar of the waves. I remember sitting under the trees with this delicate wind caressing my face. So we put the table in the garden, knowing we wouldn’t have done this had my parents been alive, and ate all our meals there, sitting late into the evening talking over glasses of wine. It was a melancholy time but greatly pleasurable in the way that melancholy can be. We knew it was the last time that we would live in our childhood house, and we had time to pay attention to this. We were sad that our mother had died, but she was old, and ready, in fact we were sure she had allowed herself to die, she had a number of times survived the slight illness that killed her, but this time she embraced it, let herself be seduced into the


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death she desired, and we were part of the everlasting cycle of life, where children bury their parents and go on to make their own lives, trusting that their children will bury them, and not the other way round. Christmas lunch was a huge pile of prawns, which we’d got up early and gone to the fish market to buy, small sweet prawns, the best ones, locally caught, with black bread and butter and pepper and lemon, and good white wine, all of us sitting there peeling our own, the children old enough to manage, eating as much as we wanted. So luxurious.

* There’s another memory, a winter Christmas this, the other side of the world, Paris, in a studio flat in its own way as exiguous but well-positioned as the Merewether house. It had two narrow single beds, a small table, three chairs, a bookcase. A television. Green lino tiles on the floor. That floor is in The Golden Dress, always covered in dust. Graham used to wash it, and even before it was dry you could see the dust filming over it. Where did it come from, when the double-glazed windows were shut for the winter? The single beds are in the novel too, but there my heroine ties them together with plaited plastic bags. I didn’t think of that at the time, they were always skating apart, there was always a gap, the lovely cuddly sleeping of long-married couples was impossible, we held hands across the chilly space and tried not to disturb the complicated interleaving of the single bedclothes. I think it is very strange that my heroine could invent this clever way to keep the beds together and I living there couldn’t. Paris is a city unlike any other in the world: everybody covets it. Mention Newcastle, Oh yes, surprisingly nice, London, fabulous, Vienna, gorgeous, New York—maybe New York comes closest to Paris in the desire the rest of the world has to possess it. People who go there


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fall in love with it, people who haven’t been are in love with the idea of it. Yet Paris always finally cannot be owned. I often think she is a terrible old tart, or maybe a grand courtesan, but in any case a charming gorgeous whore of a city. She gives herself to you, oh yes, but you never possess her. Never get to kiss her on the lips. If you have lived there for a long time, maybe she’ll let you hold her hand, put your mouth to her cheek, stay the night, but still she’ll elude you. She is no one’s, and everyone’s, for the taking. Think of the popular songs. ‘Paris Belongs to Me’ is typical. She doesn’t. But the singers like to think so. And there is the idea that it is the city of lovers, and certainly you see a lot of them on the streets, entwined together, kissing at bus stops, walking arm in arm, gazing into one another’s eyes or passionately embracing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there were as many lovers in Canberra, per head of population, it is just that in Paris they are much thicker on the ground. And probably obliged to use public spaces. I once asked a colleague of Graham’s what he was going to do on sabbatical in Paris. He mentioned various things, most of them scholarly, and then he said, Make love in the afternoon. But he could have done that at home, gone home and visited his wife while the children were at school, but he didn’t. For him Canberra didn’t have the image of a love-in-the-afternoon kind of place. Which was probably sad. But it is fun to play at being at home there, to pretend you belong. Often people ask me the way to somewhere which I love because it means I am doing an excellent imitation of being a local. As soon as I open my mouth they realise their mistake, but usually I can tell them, and if they can let the fact that they know instantly I am not a native not worry them I’ll put them on the right track. One day I was walking back to the studio, along rue François Miron, with a baguette for lunch and a small paper bag of goodies—the Parisian habit of shopping for each meal still dogs me though once a day is usually enough. I was


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walking happily along, with springy steps. A Dutch bus went past, a huge tall coach, slowly in the busy narrow street, and the people in it looked down on me, and I looked up at them, and I could tell they were seeing me as somebody who lived there, there were faint wrinkles of envy on their faces as well as a sort of anthropological curiosity, and I went swinging along, enjoying their mistake, and for a moment Paris did belong to me. Then people came walking along the pavement, purposefully, steadfastly, and I moved out of their way, and I knew that if I had been a true Parisienne I would not have side-stepped but however I willed myself to do so I never could maintain my own path, and I knew they knew I didn’t really belong. But that’s all right, I have my own place that I belong to and wouldn’t swap it. People say, if you were rich, wouldn’t you buy an apartment in Paris? Why don’t you get something in the country, in the south, property is still cheap there. But it is Australia I live in. France is a lovely place to visit, but ... But it’s Christmas of 1991 and for a time we are living here. We ordered five dozen oysters, again small and sweet, and Graham spent the morning opening them. I’d bought a tiny tree in a pot, tied little red ribbon bows all over it, stood it on a herring box that I’d scavenged from rubbish put out in the street and covered with a scarf. I’d got a small quantity of foie gras, mi-cuit, that is not preserved, and at the vendor’s instigation, a tiny tin of sauternes jelly to serve with it, on toast made on one of the two tinny hotplates which were the flat’s only cooking facilities, using one of those metal heat diffusers, which actually works quite well provided you watch it closely. Graham’s oldest friend and his partner and a dear friend from England came with a roast of biche, it was called, which means doe, except we don’t call it that in English when we eat it: venison we would say. It came with a rich fruity sauce. We cooked it in an iron pot on the tinny hotplate. We had green bean salad with walnuts, a bit warm. And our friends had to bring their own chairs, the flat was in all respects exiguous.


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For dessert I had been on Christmas eve to the most famous icecream house in Paris, Berthillon, just over the river on the Ile St Louis; as I said, the apartment had position. Their ices are handmade from the finest of ingredients and cost a lot of money. When we took them in their cardboard cartons out of the tiny freezer of the bar-sized fridge they had all melted, into a thick cream. We still ate it, it tasted good but it wasn’t ice-cream, it was rather sickly and rich in this melted state, it needed iciness to make it truly itself, I had never so thoroughly realised that the point of ice-cream is its iciness counteracting its richness, and we felt guilty that such a delicacy had suffered so at our hands. In our Australian insouciance born of big fridges with powerful freezers, it had not occurred to us that the small job would be also feeble. And now that oldest friend is dead and so is my husband. But the little tree is growing in a garden in the bosky environs of Paris, not far from Fontainebleau, in a house in a street called rue Dieu. God Street. Every now and then I inquire after it, and remember the feast that it graced. The old house at Merewether was not long ago sold again, this time for an enormous amount of money, and moved I believe to a paddock on a dairy farm near Paterson, in the Hunter Valley. In its place is one of those outsize featuristic houses that look like a spaceship masquerading as an ocean liner. I often wonder: did they keep the pohutukawas? Two cities: sophisticated Paris, provincial Newcastle. And in each, melancholy and making do, and yet the memory is of the most intense happiness. Sharpness provides savour. I have lived altogether for a number of years in Paris, and I think one element of my affection for it is poverty. Harsh word, but relatively true, anyway. I remember one year we were there I considered carefully whether to buy a tin tart tray to make quiche in. It would cost a small amount of money but I could make cheap meals in it instead of buying meat, so it would be an economy in the end. I’ve still got it. I think living without a lot of


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money in a place means you have to live like the locals, you learn to understand what is important and what isn’t. I used to walk through Paris on long summer evenings and see people sitting on café terraces and think how wonderful to be part of that glamorous heedless crowd talking, laughing, drinking. Now I can do that whenever I am there, and I remember the wistful figure I was, and it gives me a poignant kind of pleasure to be spending a bizarre amount of money on glasses of beer, at the same time as I think, you weren’t missing out on all that much, really, you had a place to live and a family you loved and delicious wine at home to drink. We were young and healthy, we managed, we were happy. At the time we thought that life was hard, now I see the bliss that was in it.


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What shall we have for dinner? . . . summer

What shall we have for dinner? What do you want for dinner? This is an anguished cry and often heard in suburban and indeed urban households of whatever makeup, gender and partnership. I have a habit of wailing: I don’t mind buying it, and cooking it, just tell me what you want to eat. I’ll do the work, you do the thinking. I have a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, and yet thinking of what to go and buy remains difficult. It’s the balance as much as anything: nothing too fattening, or fatty, not too rich (most of the time), good and vegetable, not red meat again, you could eat fish just for once, I’m sick of pasta, sort of thing. It reminds me of an experience I had when I was first married. A long time ago, 1963 in fact. I had the current notions of wifely responsibilities, which would seem old-fashioned now. It was in that star-eyed honeymoon phase, when a nicely married young woman imagined herself as the perfect wife. That was when I had my experience. You could perhaps call it a vision, if something so black deserves the name. It made me think of Macbeth, the part where he goes to the witches and asks them about the future. He’s already bloodily murdered a number of people to get hold of the throne, now he wants to know will he be able to pass it on to his


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children; will the descendants of Banquo, his dear friend whom he also killed, ever inherit it, ever reign over the kingdom that he has lost so much to gain? The witches show him a procession of kings all looking like Banquo, and obviously his offspring, the last one carrying a mirror in which a whole lot more are reflected. He cries, What, will the line

stretch out to the crack of doom? That was me, realising that I had a lifetime of meals to prepare. One, two, even three meals a day, all made by me. Lined up and marching out into the invisible future. What, I cried, will the line stretch

out, even to the crack of doom? I didn’t have Macbeth’s guilt, of course, and any blood on my hands had not been spilled by me, but still, it was a black vision. And it has not ended up being quite so bad, since all the cooking has not in fact been done by me alone, but nevertheless it was and is a sobering thought. And even more so if you are a modern person who has chosen the inner city life in a kitchenless flat—which is apparently an urban myth, but urban myths are narratives we like to tell ourselves and maybe need, and all the more sinister for that. It is difficult even in your perfect kitchen, modern streamlined, cosy farmhouse, granite and stainless steel and European appliances, whatever took your fancy, now built luxuriously to your specifications. Meals are always with us. So, when Macbethian visions strike, what to do? One thing is going to a market or some trustworthy shops and hoping for inspiration. But it helps to have some idea. The other day I’d looked in the fridge and found some decent feta cheese. A Greek salad? I’m late going to the shops, finally getting my act together to catch the post before 6 o’clock. The weather is hot and searingly dry, the daily news is of bushfires destroying homes in fifteen-minute flashes of firestorm. Even the rainforest is burning. Fussing about shopping might seem frivolous. But eating badly isn’t going to help anyone. The fruit shop has wheeled its display inside and is covering


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W h a t s h a l l w e h a v e f o r d i n n e r ? . . . s u m m e r | 29

everything with wet sacks. You’re not closed, are you, I say. No no. Anything I want .... So I ask, and they bring. Smelling the melons for just the right one, choosing firm cucumbers, showing me branches of vine-ripened tomatoes, fetching a bunch of fresh basil from out the back. Yesterday I bought a basil in a tiny plastic tub and planted it in a much larger terracotta pot on the windowsill but I don’t want to ravage it yet. While they choose I pick up some small scruffy peaches and nectarines, both delicious smelling. Twenty dollars fifty says the smiling man, twenty dollars will do. To the fish shop. Prawns, 250 grams. Another smiling man weighs them. Six twenty, he says. Then he picks up a specially large prawn. He holds up the bag. Six twenty he says again, and drops the big prawn in. I love small shopkeepers. I come home very cheerful after such small kindnesses. And dinner? I open a pleasant riesling in one of the new screw-cap bottles. Not so long ago in another drastic summer I was on the television—a special edition of The 7.30 Report—with five other writers talking about the state of the country, eating lunch at the Wharf restaurant in Sydney with the other side of the harbour invisible and the bridge a shadowy looming presence because of the thick bushfire smoke that covered the city, an exercise that enraged a whole lot of viewers as an appalling waste of taxpayers’ money, though in fact the ABC remarked that it was very cheap television, compared with, say, opening a landline to Moscow. A filler, in fact. It was new year, shortly after the Tampa affair, and the writers were the first six who happened to say yes, a lot of people were unavailable. I said my new year’s wish would be for us as a country to show more imagination in thinking about others. A lot of viewers were very happy with this and agreed excitedly, others were vituperative. I was called in a letter to The Australian a chardonnay swilling socialist poseur. This irritated me for a number of


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reasons. For one thing I am not at all fond of chardonnay, and it was dispiriting that people could only think in the same old clichés of freeloading lefty writers and not pay attention to what any of us were saying, for we had different opinions and disagreed quite strongly. Moreover I cannot see why drinking chardonnay is such a reprehensible act—a great many people do it and are neither poseurs nor swillers nor socialists. I thought the more damning expression was Grange socialist; in England they say Bollinger socialist. Both implying that your drinking habits betray your politics. Whereas chardonnay can be the cheapest of wines. It is the drink of ordinary people and not at all an indicting contradiction. In fact only one of us drank chardonnay, I had riesling, another beer, another coca cola, another cranberry juice, another water, and our opinions were as different as our drinks. Anyway, back in my own kitchen, a glass of riesling with some of the melon chopped into chunks and eaten with small forks off a communal plate. Thin slices of black bread, buttered, and the prawns peppered and squeezed with lemon from the garden. The Greek salad: a good heavy-handed splash of olive oil in a bowl, a quick dash of vinegar, red onion chopped into it, then tomato, cucumber, the feta cheese, and a quantity of basil leaves ripped, the whole thing tossed. Followed by the rather battered-looking delicious little peaches and nectarines. Next day I go to the fish shop again. Are the oysters fresh? Yes, just come in from their farm on the Clyde River, near Batemans Bay. I’ll have a dozen and a half. Sorry, we only sell in dozens. Well, two dozen then. And some flathead tails, in theory no bones— six should do three people. In fact three would have been enough; this is a problem I have, I tend to buy rather extravagantly. I do three of the tails like this.


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S t e a m e d f l a t h e a d t a i l s | Put the tails on a strong china plate, splash a little soy sauce over them and a teaspoon of Chinese rice wine or mirin vinegar or even lemon juice. Chop garlic and spread over, along with a chunk of ginger grated. Place a kaffir lime leaf on each. Trickle a little olive oil over. (I know olive oil isn’t Asian but I don’t care for the so-called tasteless oils like corn or peanut.) Leave for a little while—until you are ready to cook it. Steam in a bamboo steamer over a wok for only a few minutes, until the fish is opaque and firm when poked with a skewer. There will be a lot of juice. Serve with rice, or bread, or salad, or all three. See how vague this recipe is. That’s because you do what you like with it: add spring onions, or mild red onions, leave out garlic or ginger if you want. I saw on the television Stefano de Pieri do it with chunks of Murray cod, ginger and butter. It is an Asian dish but cooked in an Australian household so you can mop up the juices with bread if you prefer or serve it with mashed potatoes. You could use verjuice instead of soy and rice wine and add some tarragon. The only important thing is not to overcook the fish. The extravagant buyer has three tails left over:

M a r i n a t e d r a w f i s h | It can be a good idea not to call this raw fish, if you are for instance giving it to children, or squeamish people. In fact the action of the lemon juice cooks it so it is not raw in the way that sashimi is. Cut fish into chunks. Put into a bowl with lemon juice and a clove of garlic chopped. Leave overnight in the fridge. Next day rinse off lemon juice, strain and serve in a salad, of chopped avocado, diced tomato, mild onions, with an olive oil and vinegar dressing. Maybe some basil, or parsley. Lettuce if you wish. You can add a little chili if you like it.


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And the oysters? Eighteen were eaten at the beginning of the steamed fish meal—it’s Friday night, the end of the week, a time for eating well—with pepper, lemon juice, brown bread and butter. I was trained to be very pure in my oyster eating, and these small sweet Clyde River oysters are perfect like this. But the six left over: I mix a little almond oil (or else very mild olive) with some sherry vinegar and spoon it over them, add some cut up chives, and put them in a 200° oven for three minutes, in a shallow patty-cake tin to hold them steady. The shells are hot, the oysters slightly warm, in warm juice, but not cooked. Delicious as a little appetiser for two for Saturday lunch.

* Considering I am a writer and one day is much like another to me, that I often work on Saturday and Sunday and my time is free to organise as I wish, I am quite keen on the ritual of weekends as occasions for more serious eating, a carryover from years of children at school and husband at work, when there was more leisure at these times to sit over food and talk and drink wine. I am a creature of habit and I like this one. At least once or twice at the weekend meals should be sat over and paid attention to, so I think. While I’m still thinking of long hot summers, some more salads.

To a s t e d go a t s ’ ch e e s e s a l a d | Greens—I like cos, and mignonette, and oak leaf. You can have one kind, or a mixture, or buy some leaves ready washed from the market. Rocket is good, and so is baby spinach. Make a vinaigrette, in the salad bowl, with oil and vinegar—I like a lot of oil to just a dash of vinegar—with some mustard if you wish—if you use Dijon mustard you can whip it into the dressing to form an emulsion—a little onion or garlic, fresh herbs, perhaps some small Swiss brown mushrooms sliced, and toss in salad leaves.


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Slice bread thickly—sourdough, or baguette, or ciabatta—and cut roughly to size of rounds of goats’ cheese, toast on one side in the oven. When I use ciabatta I cut the slices in halves, or a baguette needs simply slicing. It is hearty salad, not finicking. Turn over and spread with cheese, toast until bread is golden. You can rub the turned-over slices with a little garlic if you wish. Arrange cheese toasts over salad. Toss if you wish. This is not so much a recipe as an idea. You take the basic notion and do what you like with it. Whereas this next is a recipe and quite strict. It is Lucy’s Caesar salad, developed after much research and reading of a great many recipes all claiming to be the authentic one. One thing is certain, the ubiquitous Caesar of just about every café menu is hardly ever as it ought to be for the experience of flavours and textures it claims to be offering, and the addition of chicken is an abomination, it is too heavy and rich and not the right flavour. Jill Dupleix in New Food has a recipe she calls the I’d-forgotten-howgood-it-is Caesar salad. Alan Saunders says he likes to order it in cafés so he can enjoy being pedantic about how everybody gets the recipe wrong. This of Lucy’s is, of course, the right one. Well, it certainly avoids the worst errors.

L u c y’s C a e s a r s a l a d | Put into a salad bowl and mix well: 1 whole raw egg 1 tablespoon mustard (French, seedless) 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon vinegar (red wine) 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 small onion chopped

3–4 rashers bacon, cut in dice and fried in olive oil till lightly browned. Add to the oil 3 slices of white bread, also diced, and when it is golden stir in some garlic—don’t cook much.


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Put leaves of cos lettuce in dressing with 8 anchovy fillets chopped in several pieces and enough grated parmesan cheese to well coat the lettuce. I always grate the cheese as shaved bits do not coat the leaves thoroughly enough. Toss, add bacon and bread, serve. Here’s another good substantial salad:

S p i n a ch s a l a d | Wash some young spinach leaves. Cut rashers of bacon into short strips. Boil some eggs for 8 minutes, so they are almost hard boiled (you can do them for longer if you wish). Make a dressing of a small portion of oil and a good splash of vinegar, finely chop a clove or two of garlic, mix well. Add the spinach, toss. Fry bacon until quite crisp and brown. Add to spinach leaves—the fattiness of the bacon is the reason for the small amount of olive oil. Cut the eggs into quarters, add to salad. Deglaze the bacon pan with a little white wine, reduce, add to salad, toss. The hot bacon and the deglazing juices just slightly wilt the spinach, which is delicious. This makes an excellent small meal, perhaps after some sushi, or followed by some cheese. Again, the recipe is vague, the quantities depending on the number of eaters, and their tastes: more or less bacon, the egg a garnish or more substantial. I think we have to take responsibility for recipes, how we create them for our tastes, or the particular meal.

* There is a kind of snobbery about lettuces. It is as though, having been able to get nothing but iceberg for years we then had to reject it utterly in favour of designer greens. Whereas in fact a good iceberg is a fine thing and should not be forgotten. Maggie Beer at her restaurant called Charlick’s which was in an old feed store in the middle of Adelaide used to do a lovely one. This is not her recipe but my guess at how it was done.


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I c e b e rg l e t t u c e s a l a d | Take a good nuggety iceberg and remove the outside leaves. Cut it into eighths and arrange the triangular slices on a long platter, rather like slices of watermelon. Make your favourite vinaigrette and add a quantity of chopped chives, pour over lettuce wedges. This has often the charm of surprise; people still do not expect to be fed iceberg lettuce in any kind of elegant statement. And so delicious in its crispness and crunchiness, compared with the softness of so many lettuces. H a l o u m i s a l a d | Slice tomatoes onto plates, one for each diner. Peel an avocado and cut into wedges, arrange with some leaves of rocket over the tomatoes. You could add some thin slices of mild onion. Dress with a vinaigrette. Cut some haloumi cheese, one or two slices per person, cook in olive oil until brown, lay over salad and serve immediately. An excellent first course for dinner, or a meal in itself if you wish. It offers the pleasure of an arranged plate all to yourself. To m a t o s a l a d w i t h b o c c o n c i n i | Slice tomatoes on a shallow platter. Dress with a vinaigrette and herbs—some people would use only oil, finding tomatoes acidic enough—and possibly some finely sliced garlic. Slice bocconcini over tomatoes and drizzle on some more dressing. You can put this under a hot grill for a few moments to brown the cheese a little, in which case you should serve a lot of good soaking-up bread since the juices will run. This is excellent made with ordinary cow’s milk bocconcini, and superb with the true buffalo variety, if you are feeling rich. These cheeses are a form of mozzarella. There are the standard balls, as well as small cherry ones, and plaits or twists. Originally they were made around Naples from sheep’s milk, and then when buffaloes were


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brought from India early in the sixteenth century, and were found to thrive in the mild dry climate, their milk was used. The buffalo milk cheeses are generally the richest and most flavoursome, but so far in this country they are so expensive they are a special treat. Some of the cow’s milk versions are superb. And the slightly duller ones are an excellent basis for dressings and the flavours of herbs and vegetables. David Mackintosh who illustrated my children’s book, The Midwife’s Daughters, has been in London working as a book designer. For a while he was with a firm called Co and Bear, who did a book titled Mozzarella which assumes you’ll be using the buffalo variety. All the recipes came from well-known English chefs, who were asked to create dishes using it. The best part, David said, was going to the kitchens of famous hotels and restaurants, and watching the people at work. Maybe this was where he got the idea for the children’s book about the irascible chef which we are working on now: Bruno Pascal Figg, the tyrant of the kitchen. Bruno is a genius with food, but terrorises his apprentices, shouting violently poetic abuse and throwing knives at them. I found David’s mozzarella book in a gift shop in Brisbane and bought it for Lucy’s birthday, a rather sentimental act I have to say. We haven’t actually made much from it, since some of it is complicated professional chefery, but it is a beautiful book, and that is something. After all, just how vicarious are the pleasures of cookbooks? Once they were manuals, households would have one or perhaps two which they consulted for the practicalities of the serious business of turning out edible food. Now we read them like art books. In fact, Mozzarella passes the cookbook test, which is, if you cook two dishes out of it, it deserves a place on the useful shelves. One of the best and most absolutely simple is a salad.

I n s a l a t a d el P r i n c i p e d i N a p o l i | In the middle of a plate you put a plait of mozzarella, on the left of it slices of tomato, on the right slices


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of avocado. You dress with olive oil, salt and pepper, and garnish with basil leaves. I think it is comical that so simple a salad should have so grand a name: Salad of the Prince of Naples. This is probably because the three ingredients, red tomato, white cheese, and green avocado, are the colours of the Italian flag. Pizza as we know it today is supposed to have come about because a baker fancied up the usual bread dough, oil, herbs, possibly a few anchovies, which had been sustaining Neapolitans for a couple of centuries, with tomatoes and mozzarella and basil—again, the colours of the flag—in honour of the visit of the king and queen of Italy, in 1899. The royal couple had ordered pizza to show their solidarity with the people. The baker called his variation pizza Margherita, after the queen—and so it remains. The other dish is a classic risotto, made with butter, chicken stock and saffron, with mozzarella stirred in a minute before it is taken off the heat, and served with parmesan cheese and rocket leaves wilted through it. It is called ‘Saffron and Mozzarella Risotto with Rocket’, and the recipe came from Matthew Harris at Bibendum, in the marvellously Art Deco building which used to be home to the Michelin tyre people. The Salad of the Prince of Naples came from a restaurant called San Lorenzo. I remember eating pizza in Naples when we were travelling with Lucy, who was ten months old. I’d stay in the hotel putting her to bed and Graham would go out and buy some. It was thick and bready, with the tomato sunk into it. Nothing at all like the thin biscuity crust that is served in pizza chains, or the comical toppings of gourmet pizzas, with their tandoori chicken or Mediterranean lamb. That pizza in Naples was food for the hard-up and those who couldn’t eat normally at home or in a restaurant, which was us on both counts. We thought it was wonderful. With local wine in toothglasses.


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Should you want to make your own pizza, here is a simple recipe. Not quite such a chunk of bread with a little topping as that long-ago Naples job, but quite thick. It comes originally from Stefano de Pieri, who is very keen on simplicity and goodness. And of course, it is the classical Margherita—pizza of the Queen of Italy.

Pizza.

Dough (this will make 4 plate-sized pizzas—you can double the quantity if you wish):

250 grams flour 10 grams salt 10 grams dried yeast

175 mils water 1 tbsp olive oil

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and knead for about ten minutes. Rest another ten, knead, form into four balls and stretch to desired size.

Topping—for each pizza: Chop 1 large tomato and spread over dough. Add 2 sliced bocconcini, dot with torn-up basil leaves and 2 anchovies, chopped. You can put on a little chilli if you like. Drizzle with olive oil. Bake at 220° for 15–20 minutes. This seems a good thing to make on a Sunday night. The lazy cook can get the eaters to top their own pizzas, and of course you can use any ingredients you like: olives, seafood, slices of salami, mushrooms, garlic, onions. Even tandoori chicken if the spirit moves you. When my children were small, but old enough to be competent at these things, about eight or nine, we used to have pizza birthday parties. I’d make a pizza dough, give them all a small ball which they stretched and flattened, standing round the table loaded with toppings: grated cheese, tomatoes, bits of sausage, chopped bacon, garlic, onions, an array of different things, and let them do their own. They had great fun, creating patterns, or faces, putting on the foods they


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liked and ignoring those they didn’t, naturally needing often to taste the offerings, making a fine mess and eating the results with gusto.

* I suffered for a good bit of my married life through being seen as a frightfully good cook. Numbers of people told me that they would not, could not, invite me to dinner, they were terrified of not being able to compete. No matter how often I said I loved simple food, ordinary food, that I was never critical of other people’s food, that just being invited out and not having to cook was a wonderful treat, a certain number of my guests never ever invited me back. Nowadays I think people wouldn’t worry. If they were prosperous they’d invite you out to a restaurant (which nobody ever did when I was young) or they would go somewhere and buy some good things and feed you those. Recently I was taken to lunch with some people who told me our hostess couldn’t cook, she wasn’t any good at it so she would just do tuna sandwiches. I said that would be excellent, I love sandwiches, and good ones are all too hard to come by in cafés. In fact we had a wonderful salad of rare roast beef with a whole variety of vegetables and salads. I suspect she ordered it from the kind of place that does this sort of catering but she wasn’t letting on. The dessert, a fresh lime cream, she had made herself. Once upon a time there would have been a certain stigma attached to buying in food. Coming from that belief of women like my mother and aunts and grandmother, that shop bought was far inferior to homemade—indeed they were usually right, it was—and that to serve such things showed a want of respect. It is quite a delicate matter to discern where the proper respect, the proper attentiveness, to a guest, lies. Always has been. Samuel Johnson remarking acidly that this was a good enough dinner indeed but not one to invite a man to, was referring to it. We say, it will just be simple, bread and cheese, a salad, some


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fruit, but we have somehow to make people feel we have taken some small trouble that shows we care about them. Maybe we can express it in the plates and glasses we use, or the fact that we have gone to the good cheese shop. And buying in delicious food is I think more flattering to guests than ambitious failures on the host’s part. Well, it’s more palatable. Anyway, I scared off quite a lot of people in my day. It makes me feel a bit sad. We could have had some good times if friends had believed what I said about liking ordinary food. We could have quoted Sullivan, the other half of Gilbert, saying that what matters at a dinner is not what is on the table but what is on the chairs, namely the guests— there is a good answer to Sam Johnson. The other thing that happened was that people went to amazing lengths to be they thought good enough. This was the era of competitive dining. You had to keep lists. Mmm, she did that last time, what can we do to match it? Better it? Sometimes this was fun, I have had some amazing meals in this game, but thank goodness I’ve given it up. One of the problems was that the conversation became as competitive as the cooking, with people jockeying to hold the floor and top one another’s anecdotes. The truth is, I have always been at heart a lazy cook. Quite purist, mostly, but it is interesting being both these things at once—not at all impossible. The salad of the Prince of Naples is very simple, very lazy cooking, and very pure. In fact if you can manage to simultaneously practise laziness and purity you will eat pretty well, because the food will be simple and good. Here is a dinner menu for twelve that is all of these things. I devised it at the time of a Word Festival. We’d had a number of meals out, we were a bit tired of restaurants, and wanted to eat at home. But everybody had been out all day for several days at panels and launches and readings, there were no fairies in the kitchen to whip up something good, and I hadn’t been organised enough to cook a huge casserole or whatever.


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I bought a pile of excellent tomatoes. I put them in a bowl in the middle of the table with a bottle of olive oil and one of vinegar and another bowl of basil leaves. Sea salt and black pepper to grind. Everybody took a tomato and made their own salad. I bought some sausages from the good butcher, he does boudin blanc, literally white puddings, very delicate poached sausages of chicken and veal. I cooked these gently in two frying pans, setting guests to watch them. There were plenty of people about to help, especially opening wine bottles, everybody was very hyped up and you had to speak quite loudly and firmly to them as they stood about the kitchen still in the conversations of the day. The kitchen was full of people leaning on every space, and I had a rather hunchbacked feeling as I ran around ducking under gesticulating arms so it was lucky there wasn’t much cooking to do. A lettuce salad got made, and a pile of cheeses was unwrapped. There was fruit, and a lot of good bread. People sat where they wanted. One of the guests was a bit shocked by the do-it-yourself tomato salad and still remarks on it. Of course this was a very jolly group with a great deal to talk about and almost nobody was driving so they happily drank plenty of wine and went on chattering as they had all weekend. I had a wonderful time because it wasn’t much work. But of course I had thought about it so it wouldn’t be, and bought excellent ingredients so that the food was delicious—simple, pure, very good. The perfect lazy person’s meal. Another time, after a book launch, where nothing had been planned, we all went back to my place, and everybody chipped in and a couple of people went and bought pizza, a good one, not industrial or from a chain. This meal was about company, but the pizza was worth eating. The main thing about eating well is not to be precious about it, or snobbish; eating together is as much about the together as the eating. A bit of muddle can be quite welcoming; it certainly isn’t threatening.


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All those people who were scared of feeding me—if they could see me now. And the Macbethian vision? I decided that food could be a chore, a dreary routine to be performed without delight or desire, like the housewives in a queue outside a butcher’s shop in Cambridge, in a lane called Petty Cury, why outside I do not know since inside was empty and the street was medieval and cobbled, with a footpath a step wide and big trucks trundling by, the season the dead of winter, the women reciting the week’s inexorable pattern of meals, Sunday roast, Monday shepherd’s pie, Tuesday liver, Wednesday mince, Thursday sausages, and I wondered what chaos was kept at bay by this soulless regimen. Or else food could be interesting because it was an idea, something to be learned about, with a history and an etymology and rituals and meanings, with its own literature and indeed its own forms of art. Which can be practised, or simply discussed. Have you noticed? When people eat a meal together, they will often talk about meals they have eaten in the past, or those they plan to eat in the future. They will sit companionably over an omelette and a glass of wine, as Elizabeth David describes her simplest of meals, later using the words as the title for a book, and remember Henry James on his Little Tour in France eating eggs with a pound or two of butter, the best he’d ever tasted, or Alice Toklas’s cook getting irritated with Matisse for inviting himself to dinner too often, and frying the eggs instead of making an omelette, which took the same number of eggs, namely twelve, but showed less respect, and this would not be lost on Matisse; being French, he would know. Or discuss the duck breast they will sear with a red wine sauce and eat with baby turnips and fresh shelled peas, and then there is the expedition they will make to the good cheese shop on the other side of town. And isn’t it time we had a cassoulet again, or Rosemary Brissenden’s Thai beef salad, or that cold daube of beef with Chinese star anise.


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They are not simply feeding, as cats or dogs do, munching their way through a plate of food, getting the meal down as much and as fast as possible in the way of wild creatures in case there isn’t another where that one came from, they are nourishing themselves on the food they eat as a form of culture as well as a kind of fuel. They may not in fact get round to cooking the cassoulet or the duck breast, but what pleasure they have had in talking about them.


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Desire and discontent

The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables—piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes, nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and bluey purple, carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black-purple cauliflowers, like niggers’ heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables, all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops, and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps. You can read these words in the cookbook that began the postwar revolution in English-speaking eating habits. I mean Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food, which is also one of the few truly vicarious recipe books in existence, since at the time it was written its readers would have had little chance of finding any of the ingredients needed. It was


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designed to comfort them in those dreary late 1940s of rationing and shortages, when the war was won but peace had not brought plenty, and the fact that we now cook its kind of recipe all the time is the result of the revolution it began. When I was first married and went to New Zealand we visited a former colleague of Graham’s, I suppose she was about ten years older than me. She had a later book of David’s on her mantelpiece, French Country Cooking. We both said, Isn’t it wonderful, the food’s fantastic and the writing so good. Have you tried such and such, I asked. Oh no, she said, I haven’t actually cooked anything from it, have you used it? She found it quite odd that I had; though she was familiar with this kind of food, had been to France and eaten it, she tasted it vicariously through reading of it. That moment for me was somehow recognising the cusp of the revolution. My generation took it for granted that these dishes were there to be cooked; hers was much slower to do as well as read. The words I’ve quoted above are not David’s; they are D. H. Lawrence’s description of the vegetable market at Palermo, in Sea and Sardinia. I quote them because they are archetypal market speak, a paradigm of all those mandatory breathless evocations of raw plenty. They describe foods in a foreign place with such naked desire they become erotic, visceral, shocking—and not just because of the taboo race word. They make us yearn to possess them, possibly by trying to replicate them at home, possibly by taking a tour of the kind mentioned in a recent English House and Garden magazine, run by a firm called Market Discoveries, offering tours of the markets of Paris, Billingsgate, west Cork, and a sushi day trip around London. In Australia you can do tours of the Victoria Market in Melbourne, the Sydney Fish Markets and the Adelaide Markets. David uses as chapter headings quotations from ‘real’ writers. Invariably they refer to specific food and places: what I ate where, what I saw, smelt, touched, the particular exotic delicious idiosyncratic


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D e s i r e a n d d i s c o n t e n t | 47

nature of the experience. Food is a kind of carnal spirit of a place. It is where its most essential nature is to be found. And a great many serious writers have wanted to find words for it. After Mediterranean food David got us into French eating and then Italian. She wasn’t the first to recommend it; Ford Madox Ford writing Provence in 1935 had told us that civilisation begins where garlic starts and the Brussels sprout ends, somewhere along the Rhone Valley, rather harsh words I think since a delicious tender nutty just-cooked sprout with a little butter is a fine thing. But David got people doing it. It’s possible to be critical of this, as English writers sometimes are, to say that such foods are not necessarily suitable for naturalising outside their native lands. Not such a problem in Australia, where conditions are often similar to those of the culinarily blessed climes of southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, but possibly a worry in chilly northern England, which has serious traditions of its own. And it certainly hadn’t lacked books telling how to prepare its familiar foods. One of these, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, was published in 1923 by Jessie Conrad. Coping with the help of but a single servant, she explains to us how it should not be necessary for a wife to spend more than one and a half to two hours preparing lunch, and another two and a half to three hours on dinner, and still eat well. Her first chapter gives precise instructions on how to avoid the odours of cooking, since we don’t want the small house to smell of old food. ‘It means that good food is being spoiled in the kitchen.’ I came across a mention of this book when I was looking for a beetroot recipe in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book and searched it out in the National Library. Conrad’s beetroot is cooked in a kind of braise, with onions and cream and vinegar, served in a ring of mashed potatoes. (I didn’t make this, but another one, of Italian provenance, slicing the cooked vegetable in a vinaigrette with onion and garlic and mint; it’s lovely and fresh.) Grigson wonders if maybe she got it on a visit to


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Poland with her husband. For the book’s interest is not really its author but its preface by Joseph Conrad, the great Polish–English novelist. In this he confesses he hasn’t read his wife’s work, he would find it impossible to read through a cookery book, but he offers himself, ‘modestly but gratefully’, as ‘a Living Example of her practice’. Mrs Conrad’s cooking has kept him happy on a daily basis. ‘We owe much to the fruitful mediations of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen—the kitchen of the small house.’ That’s interesting, when you get the impression that he never set foot in kitchens. I reckon Conrad has something of my admiration for suburbia; he is not talking about farms or small manors in the country, but the suburban house in a city. ‘Of all the books produced since the most remote ages by human talents and industry those only that treat of cooking are, from a moral point of view, above suspicion,’ he tells us. Every other piece of prose may be untrustworthy, except cookery books, whose sole purpose can ‘be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind’. He goes on to explain that ‘Good cooking is a moral agent.’ As a writer of fiction myself and as an admirer of Conrad’s I would have thought that novels are the kind of literature likely to have a moral role, but no. A good cookbook, by saving us from indigestion, can make us into serene and noble beings. You have only to look at the Red Indians, ‘the noble Red Man’, he says, great warriors, great orators, but because they ‘were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia’ they showed a ‘sombre and excessive ferocity’, and behaved with unreasonable violence. It’s a rather terrifying notion that only modest recipes can save us from perpetual indigestion leading to savage violence, but the connection of bad food and unhappiness had a lot of currency in the early twentieth century. Does anybody these days read H. G. Wells’ History of Mr Polly, whose hero is driven to despair and almost suicide, but


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commits arson instead, by his wife’s dreadful food? He finally finds perfect happiness with the landlady of the Potwell Inn, who of course is an excellent cook. King O’Malley founded not just Federation but courses in Home Economics so that young women could keep their future husbands happy, mainly by not inducing flatulence in them. I have described in chapter fifteen how in the nineteenth century a doctor called Philip Muskett reckoned that a wife’s good cooking—preferably in a Mediterranean mode—would keep her husband out of the pub and so save society from the scourge of drunkenness. Newly married, I had a small volume called 1001 Ways to Please a Husband: The Bride’s Cookbook. A friend of mine wanted a copy but was so scathing about its title she refused to ask for it by name. She’d go into bookshops and say she was looking for a cookbook, a basic one, for newlyweds. She never did find it. That bride learned to keep her husband happy with good food, in a very American way; mostly she cooked it, but not always from scratch. David’s dear friend Norman Douglas in South Wind says a good cook is ‘the only perfect blend of artist and philosopher’, who ‘holds in his hand the happiness of mankind’. And if she drinks a little, well, that’s a good thing, a sign of ‘sensitiveness and a capacity for enthusiasm’. In fact he doubts whether you’ll ever get good food from someone ‘who honestly despises or fears—it is the same thing—the choicest gift of God’. Somehow I can’t imagine Mrs Conrad sipping a glass of wine as she puts in all those hours in her kitchen. I wonder: would Conrad have seen the current crop of cookbooks as the only truly moral books, the only pieces of prose above suspicion? Hands up everybody who got a cookbook for Christmas ... hands up everybody who gave a cookbook for Christmas ... What will we do with all these cookbooks that changed hands? Maybe we’ll read them. Maybe we’ll cook a dish, or several. And quite likely we won’t. Maybe


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we’ll look at the pictures. The pictures: I think this is where cookbooks lose their innocence, lose their moral high ground. They are still beautiful as objects, but what are they about? Is there food after coloured pictures? is a question I ask myself. Or do we gaze at them instead of cooking them? Look at a gorgeous creation like Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer’s Tuscan Cookbook: the pictures are about a lifestyle, with their faïence plates, vine-covered terraces, rustic chairs; they’re very sexy, in this odd meaning of the word, they fill us with envy for this way of life that glossy photography will tell us how to recreate on the other side of the world. The writers are describing a thrifty and still recognisably—if at some remove—peasant lifestyle. They want us to live closer to the earth and its seasons. They offer superb recipes, some of my alltime favourites come from there, such as the risotto with radicchio, for serving with grilled quail, serious honest recipes, occasionally economical, rarely cheap but never foolishly extravagant. Nevertheless such books with their magnificent pictures that press all the buttons of those of us who hunger for a life of rustic elegance are less about the happiness of humankind than about its discontent. The desire they create in us is more a matter of covetousness than the erotic longing of Lawrence’s prose. And I would not swap his words for half a dozen photographs, however wonderfully atmospheric, of the vegetable market at Palermo. The photos might show me the young purplish artichokes, but they won’t give me ‘sea-dust-coloured’, and certainly not the sinister shivery quality of ‘the dark, greasy, nightstricken street’, or the mysterious poignancy of the luminous vegetables, ‘gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps’. It’s not just Lawrence’s words. It’s the rhythm of his prose that catches our heartbeats. Its enchanting repetitive cadences. And reading his words we possess them; no need to covet them, they belong to us. They are in our heads and our imaginations, they are part of the way we think.

*


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Other people’s words make me desire my own. David often quotes Lawrence Durrell. He wrote travel books about the Mediterranean, one about Rhodes I read when I was planning to go there, it was called Reflections upon a Marine Venus, another about Corfu. But mainly he’s famous for novels. Some time ago, I was lucky enough to spend a day in bed with a bad cold. A friend lent me a portable CD player, with earphones, and some discs. One of them was Durrell’s Justine. I lay in bed, on feather pillows, under a feather doona, full of self-pity, full of self-indulgence. I listened to the whole novel in that day in bed. You know how hard it is to read in bed when you’ve got a cold. Your eyes are all squinty and sore, the book’s too heavy, your arms get cold. But it’s a different matter, tucked up cosy, listening to a sexy voice inside your head telling you stories of love, betrayal, lust, corruption, the exhaustion that makes people hurt one another out of love, the longing for pain. Such decadence, and the language so lush, so full of strange adjectives and stranger practices. This kind of listening gives a whole new meaning to the first-person narrative. The intimacy and the relentlessness of it; you can’t pause, and reread a sentence, stare into the distance and think. The reading is a spell that goes on and on, and you float in and out of it, like a person inattentively listening to music. Of course, not all your critical faculties are lulled. The experience is strange, hallucinatory in a way, with its cunning wicked beauty, you’re entirely seduced, and then comes a little flick of your intelligence saying, isn’t this a total load of crap? But then you sink into its blissful lush decadence once more. It’s lovely. And I thought, isn’t this the archetypal novel of desire? I don’t know whether anyone reads Durrell any more (despite the fact that he’s on the American elderly white men’s list of best hundred books of the century) but for many of us the Alexandria Quartet is the novel of


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our youth, of innocence so beautifully, so coolly squandered, of death and memory. Remember the words on the second page, themselves a remembered quotation: ‘... Alexandria was the great wine-press of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets—I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.’ Who knows what it means, but what a frisson it gives—I have always been a sucker for romantic cadences. But you don’t need all this opulent paraphernalia, the exotic setting, the drugs, drink, money, beautiful women, perverse practices, doom, heat, smells, treachery, the tainted atmosphere and brackish harbour; in many ways this is a simple-minded view of desire. And, you might find yourself saying, no wonder Conrad thought his wife’s dull little cookbook the only kind of book above suspicion. But novels don’t have to be about sex or even to be erotic to be about desire. All art is about desire, the artist’s desire to take something and make something of it, which finally and always remains desire, is never fulfilled, not absolutely. As is the experience of the receiver, the audience, the reader. It’s because we are human, and live in an imperfect sublunary world. That’s what I was getting at in Wishbone, when my rich characters in their Mercedes turn on the radio and get Kiri Te Kanawa singing the Songs of the Auvergne, ‘which like a lot of art make us long for something they do not quite give us. The pain of desire is not quite assuaged by the pleasure of possession and so we must keep coming back to it in the hope of satisfaction, this time.’

* It was another later novel of Durrell’s that made me think of my desire for words. Having read Prospero’s Cell—there is a book full of desire, for the past, for another ancient lost civilisation—about Corfu, or Corcyra, as he mostly calls it, with its suggestion that the island is somehow the spiritual if not actual site of The Tempest, with its


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wonderful lengthy metaphysical conversations and its bejewelled prose, nobody does bejewelled quite so spectacularly as Durrell, I thought I would reread Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness—look how he loves glamorous titles—which was published in 1974. Prospero’s Cell is a diary, kept in 1937 and 1938; there in pre-war Corfu is another world as lost as the ancient Greek he evoked. Monsieur is a novel I reviewed when it first came out. I loved that book, nearly thirty years ago, and I wondered if it would be dangerous to read it again, would I destroy the pleasurable memory I had of it? I started it. Bejewelled prose; I am becoming envious, that he lived in a society that let him do it. I read ‘a brindled moonlight that striped the countryside like a tiger’s hide’. Provence from a train. I get to page two: ‘even in the grey winterset of early dawn the gold tangerines hang in thriving loads’ and I have to put the book down and find words for my cumquat. Going out the front door in this bushfire summer, the sun invisible except in sinister copper patches on the dry ground, and a scent dizzy, heady, sweet, with a fleshy freshness that hangs strangely on the scorching inferno breath of the day. The cumquat in its pot is covered with white waxy blossoms, as well as hung with small orange globes of fruit. The blossoms have the secret pervasive overpowering odour of weddings, a kind of lascivious odour of sanctity—though I know this not from experience but as one of the many scraps of information a person my age has in her head, and yet to smell it is to believe it. I have only to see orange blossoms of real wax to smell this odour of the living flowers. The fruit: should I pick them and make maybe one pot of marmalade? Or leave them to glow in their own little green fecund world, a cool oasis in this apocalyptic summer? Apocalyptic may seem a strong word, but that is how it is, the sun blotted out, the air full of ash and smoke, the heat caressing your cheeks like a dog-breathed lover, bent on rape.


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It is too hot to make jam. And the cumquats’ beauty is enough. Why eat it when the eye is fed by it? I have got a small orangerie, though so far it is only a word. Four big terracotta pots in the warm angle of the terrace. Only the leaves of the kaffir lime behave as they should. The Lisbon lemon, the other cumquat, the lime, they have no fruit. As yet, I hope I can say. The Meyer lemon in the back garden flourishes, and I remove the caterpillars of the citrus butterflies from my potted trees and carry them round and rehouse them there. The butterflies are large and black and white and so beautiful I can’t bear to lose them. I fill a bucket several times and water the pots. The sun is smeared like vituperative margarine on burnt toast. Time to go inside and shut it out. I did finish Monsieur. And sadly I did not love it quite as I had the first time. It did seem at times precious, overwritten, ludicrously pretentious, in its detailing of foolish characters who were little more than ciphers of decadence, in its flirting with arcane religions, in its Russian doll-boxing of narratives. But sometimes I enjoyed all those things, and I was glad I read it, and let myself be enchanted by the potent overwrought rhythms of his prose.

* For quite a long time this book I am writing was called The Emperor’s Pomegranate, a title as gorgeous as anything of Durrell’s. The idea of the pomegranate was going to run like a red thread through it, beginning with the story of Proserpine, which is where all food begins. This is the story as told by Bulfinch in his Mythology. The beautiful young maiden, daughter of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, is playing in the fields when Pluto the king of the underworld comes galloping by, in a chariot drawn by black horses. Venus, making mischief, has her son Cupid shoot an arrow into his bosom, so he falls in love with


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Proserpine, and scooping her up into his chariot dashes away into the underworld with her. Ceres, bereft, searches all through the world for her daughter, cursing the earth that has swallowed her up and laying it waste, until finally Arethusa the nymph of the fountain tells her the story of the kidnapping. Ceres asks Jupiter to release Proserpine, and he promises to do so, but only if the girl has eaten nothing during her stay in the kingdom of Erebus, where she has become the powerful bride of the king of the underworld, the realm of the dead. Unfortunately Pluto had given her a pomegranate and she has sucked the sweet pulp from several of the seeds. There has to be a compromise: she can spend half the time with her mother and half with her husband Pluto. So this is a corn allegory, Proserpine is the seed which must spend half its time buried in the earth—carried off by the monarch of the realms of the dead—until she is rescued by her mother the goddess of agriculture and comes back into the light of day. While she is away the world is a grim cold barren place, in the grip of the winter which is Ceres’ punishment of the earth for the loss of her daughter. These are the Roman names of the characters in the legend. In the Greek she is Persephone, her mother is Demeter, her husband is Hades. Sometimes he is known as Dis. And when I was an Argonaut, of ABC Radio children’s arts program, the name of my ship was Arethusa; I was Arethusa 14, as I recollect, and the nymph of the fountain did not mean much. I joined late, all the better-known names were used up. There are more legendary connections. There’s one to do with daffodils, which apparently were called Lent lilies. They were originally always white, and this was the flower that Proserpine was wearing in a wreath round her head when Pluto kidnapped her. She dropped some and they turned golden yellow. They grow on the banks of the Acheron, or Styx, the river which marks the crossing into hell, and the spirits of the dead are particularly fond of them. They call them


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asphodel. The English word was originally affodil, tracing its lineage all the way back to the Greek, asphodelos. When my daffodil garden is in bloom I shall think of the spirits of the dead, rejoicing in them, my affodils. There are a lot of pomegranate stories. They are a marvellous fruit to look at, though in this country more often admired than eaten. I have had a couscous cooked by Stephanie, with a bowl of chicken stew and another of the grain, sprinkled with the red seeds. French children are very fond of a syrup called grenadine, from the French word for the fruit. In Prospero’s Cell the Count who is much given to metaphysical musings is met walking down an avenue of cypress trees carrying an offering to the dead, of pomegranate seeds, wheat, pinenuts, almonds and raisins, soaked in honey. A peasant custom, he says, and clearly descended from some pagan rite. He exhorts them to try some, it’s very nice. He goes into the family vault and puts it down on an ancestor’s tomb, to sustain his soul, and says that afterwards they will go home with him and he will offer them some more, ‘to sustain your body’. The dead and the living are nourished by the same food. And the Bible is full of them. In the Song of Solomon, the lover is told: ‘thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks’. But then her (or maybe it is his, they seem to swap around in their admiration for one another) teeth are like ‘a flock of sheep that go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them’. Then of course you have to think these are at least partly allegorical comparisons, that beauty is in terms of fruitfulness. We all know the biblical phrase, the land flowing with milk and honey, but the country the Lord promises to the Jewish people who have spent with Moses forty years wandering in the desert is even richer: ‘a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates, a land of olive oil, and honey’. The Mediterranean diet in all its glory.


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I found these biblical references through looking up my concordance. My head is full of scraps of phrases, tags, Shakespeare, Bible texts, and I love to be able to check up on them. I found my copy of Cruden’s Concordance in an antique shop in Hall, a village near Canberra, which had quite a collection of books, most of them extraordinarily beautiful leather-bound volumes, highly coloured and with gilding, vastly expensive and entirely unreadable, generally manuals of obscure points of property law in nineteenth-century England, never interesting and now extinct. Their prices were high because they were for people who wanted books as beauteous objects on their shelves. The Concordance had a broken back so it was of no value as a decoration and I got it for $15, and a friend bound it for me, in half leather and cloth. It is one of the most marvellous word-books in existence. Think of a word, any word, and if it is in the Bible, Cruden will tell you exactly where, chapter and verse, literally this time. I had been using Alexander Cruden’s Concordance for years before I actually read its introductory memoir of his life, which was a difficult one, and the account of it seems dreadfully poignant. Maybe it is the pleasure his book has given me that makes me want to pay this little piece of attention to him. He was intended for the ministry, but early on showed evidence of ‘aberration of mind’, possibly from the bite of a mad dog, or perhaps from falling in love with a young lady and being harshly rejected, anyway, his friends placed him under restraint, in a mental asylum. It turned out that, however fine her black eyes, the young lady’s morals were rather wobbly: ‘a criminal intercourse had subsisted between her and her own brother, by whom she was actually pregnant’. No wonder his mind was disturbed. And fancy finding this mentioned in a biblical book of the eighteenth century, though it is in a footnote. He became a bookseller, and a corrector of the press, that is, copy editor. He called himself Alexander the Corrector, intending the


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meaning to be spiritual, religious, moral, rather than simply of text, and acted accordingly, and rather madly. He got involved in some foolish litigation, but calmed down, and lived a modest exemplary life, behaving in all sorts of good and generous ways to his fellows. He did his massive work of his own accord, at his own expense. My copy of his book was published in 1824, but it first appeared in 1737. It is a wonderful thing, as you can see in his account of pomegranates. The fruit, he says, is a kind of apple, covered without with a reddish skin, and red within, which opens length-ways, and shews red grains within, full of juice like wine, with little kernels. God gave orders to Moses to put embroidered pomegranates, with golden bells between, at the bottom of the high priest’s robe . . . Pomegranates being very common in Palestine, and being a very beautiful fruit, the scriptures make use of similitudes taken from the pomegranate. The blossoms of the tree or shrub that bears this fruit, are called Balausts by the Apothecaries. They are astringent, and very good in a Dysentery, Diarrhoea, and Lientery. (A lientery is a kind of diarrhoea where food passes though hardly changed. And balusters around balconies, balustrades, are named after this old word for pomegranate blossom.) Should you happen to be in Paris it is a good idea to go to the Cluny museum and sit for a while on one of the benches and simply gaze at the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn, which have a mysterious beauty that needs contemplation. Well, their beauty is evident, but its poignancy is mysterious. The Lady sits in a secret garden full of lovingly embroidered flowers and little creatures, and her dress is embroidered with pomegranates.


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While I am talking abut these biblical fruits I should mention the fig, which is an image of fruitfulness, perhaps because it bears so heavily, but possibly for other reasons. The fig leaf is traditionally used as a modest covering of the private parts, ever since Eve, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and thus learnt about sin, had realised she was culpably naked and needed to hide herself. But maybe there is a kind of sympathetic magic about this, figs being the most sensuous and darkly juicy of fruits and emblematic of the private parts thus being covered. The split and naked fig is hidden by one of its own leaves. Not only are there a lot of good pomegranate stories, there are wonderful pictures. One of my favourite books is called Florentines: A Tuscan Feast, with recipes by Lorenza de’Medici, who had a cooking program on the telly some years ago. I haven’t ever made any of the recipes, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever paid them much attention, they’re antique and complicated. The reason I bought and treasure the book is the pictures. They are reproductions of paintings by Giovanna Garzoni, who lived from 1600 to 1670. They are all still lifes of food, mostly fruit, and are fresh and lively, with a marvellous clarity and translucence. But as well there is a faint edginess to them. The fruit is mostly not perfect, it has little flaws and blets and cracks, leaves are wrinkled, or nibbled, there are always creatures depicted with a delicate and fastidious realism, hornets, gauze-winged grasshoppers, snails, a fly. A bird turns its back, a little pug dog looks at us smugly over a cup with some sweet biscuits, one decorated with flies, a goldfinch plunges his beak into a fig—and yes, it does spread itself shamelessly open. The bowls and plates are old and handsome, chipped and cracked. The fruit is quiveringly alive, so much so that its decay is already evident, it is not fixed and enamelled in its perfection, but a poignant image of mortality. And the pomegranates, split open; you can see the missing seeds, even just now eaten by Proserpine; the fruit is luscious and sexy, but you can’t doubt how near doom is.

*


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I began this chapter with Lawrence’s powerful words. Here are Durrell’s black olives to end it, more evidence that it is the words that matter, in the end. When I was a girl, tasting my first olive, shuddering, but persevering because I already knew that eating olives was important, I did not know that this was where they would lead me: The whole Mediterranean—the sculptures, the palms, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers—all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.


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Sailing on ships

I once met Elizabeth David. It was at her shop in London, in the first days of 1972. There she was, keeping shop I suppose you would say, looking the beautiful elegant remote figure with the looped hair of certain photographs, there for the talking to. I asked her had she ever thought of writing anything about children’s food, which as soon as I uttered it I knew was a stupid question but it was the first thing to come into my head. She looked appalled and gave the slightest but nonetheless definite shiver of distaste. Oh no, never. Never. She knew nothing about children. After that I couldn’t think of anything wittier or more interesting to say so I made my purchase and went off. What I bought was a ham stand, of heavy cream-coloured china with Smithfield written in a black stamp on the bottom. It is one of my treasured objects, and often at Christmas I buy a whole ham just for the pleasure of setting it up above the table on this handsome solid pillar. It works, too, cradling the great haunch of meat so you can carve it. It is extremely heavy but that was not a problem because we were travelling by ship. On the same day as David’s shop I went to Biba which is now a legend, and then encapsulated all the glitter and fun of the sixties style revolution, not to buy anything for myself but to get some clothes for the kids who were coming out of a long European winter and had nothing to


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wear on a boat in the tropics. They’d grown out of last year’s summer gear. I bought Lucy a slinky little petticoat in some pale pinky brown silky fabric, with a round neck and no sleeves, it was the best I could do. It might have been better to go to Marks and Spencer but it was the middle of January and Biba was a much more interesting way to spend the little time we had. Lucy looked gorgeous in the petticoat. She was a classically pretty child, with tumbling fair curls, huge grey eyes and a rose petal complexion. Once we had been at an art gallery, Lucy wearing cream lace stockings, black patent strap shoes and a dress made by her granny of rosebud-printed Liberty wool, with a big pink bow in her hair. A perfectly strange lady came up and planted herself in front of her. Joshua! she said in a piercing voice. Lucy looked up at her with big quivering solemn eyes. It seemed an odd thing to say to a child who was so evidently a girl. Joshua! she said again. Pure Joshua Reynolds! And went off. The boat in 1972 was Canberra, the flagship of the P & O fleet, but I liked Oriana better, which had taken us from Naples to Sydney in nineteen days. It was more elegant and friendly than grander and uglier Canberra. We embarked in Oriana in a cold February, in 1967, and the route was via the Suez Canal. The weather almost immediately became balmy and fine, and I spent most of my time on deck with Lucy, who was not quite a year old, playing about; she couldn’t yet walk and so she was pretty safe, unlike James on our next sea voyage, late in 1970, when I had to spend all my time stopping the not-quite-two-year-old coming to a bad end, either falling overboard or crashing into the empty swimming pool. Oriana had an awning stretched over the deck and even lunch was brought up there, a multifarious buffet. There were some famous people on the trip; Lionel Long—who? you are possibly asking, but he was quite a famous singer then and wanted Graham to translate some old French songs for him but nothing came of it—and John Olsen who once at the bar patted me on the knee and said, Splendid dress, and so it was, I had had it made by a dressmaker in


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S a i l i n g o n s h i p s | 63

the small town of Alassio on the Italian Riviera; she spoke no English but did a good job with the Vogue pattern, an Yves St Laurent design, I gave her. It was long with a high neck and wrist-length sleeves in a slightly psychedelic granny print in brilliant purple and puce colours—1967 this is, remember. And I was twenty-six, and when one is twenty-six many dresses are splendid. The dressmaker worked in one of those strange large barn-like spaces that one sees in Italian movies. It was very cold and she heated it with a bombola, a huge gas bottle as tall as a person, laid diagonally on a frame with a mantle mounted in front of it, the gas flame roared out and was diffused by the mantle. I suppose I should have been glad of the warmth, putting clothes off and on in this vast icy space, but I found it quite terrifying especially as the hot water heaters in our apartment’s kitchen and bathroom were brand-named Vesuvio and Volcano, altogether too much invoking of explosions for my taste. We lived in the ground floor, a granny flat in fact, of a grand villa which was all marble and high ceilings and sweeping staircase; our flat was small and chintzy and gave directly on to a magnificent terraced garden which fell steeply to the street. There was an elaborate iron gate with Villa Felice written on it and then some dozens of steps to the house high above, or you could zigzag up the terraces, but you only did this if you were loitering. In the mornings the baker came past blowing a musical horn and Graham would gallop down and buy fresh panne for breakfast. We heated the sitting room when we could afford it with olive prunings and there is a photo of Lucy in a red-checked Viyella top sitting on the hearth holding up an orange. Although it was the Riviera it snowed on our first day there but the garden was bright and Mediterranean, with nasturtiums and geraniums and marvellous big-bellied terracotta pots. It was a wonder I didn’t think of bringing one home, just buying another trunk to pack it in and put in the ship’s hold.


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We’d sailed to Europe on Himalaya which always offered elaborate curries for lunch and the steward would come round with a huge tray of sambals so you could point to the ones you wanted. They were usually Goanese, these stewards, in sparkling white Nehru jackets and it was all extremely colonial. At elevenses one could sit on a deckchair and be fed beef tea. What we longed for was garlic, and when we got to Marseille one of the women from our table minded Lucy so we could go ashore and we sat in a restaurant in the old port right on the edge of the water and ate bouillabaisse. It was wonderful, we had been suffering from garlic withdrawal symptoms, which is interesting because I had been eating the stuff only for about five years probably, but you get very easily hooked on such a marvellous substance. Nineteen days on a ship is the perfect time, you are sorry when it is over. Much longer and you are longing for it to end. But nineteen days is a holiday, and I remember the weather as always sunny and warm but not too hot. Lionel Long had a child too, a bit older than Lucy, and his then wife and I sat sybaritically and talked and read and the days passed. I had some pretty cute clothes, that I had bought in swinging London and in a shop in Cambridge, which was all a twitter one day I was there because Rita Tushingham had just come in and bought three dresses; this was when A Taste of Honey was being a big success. I had Mary Quant and Miss Selfridge, mini skirts with lacy stockings and the rather clumpy shoes that were worn with them—sometimes people recreate those times with stiletto heels but that’s wrong, it was rather blocky shoes or else the dainty good girl instep-strapped shoes that the French call babys. Jean Shrimpton had come to the Melbourne Cup when I was pregnant, shocking everybody with her short skirts and no gloves or stockings, and after Lucy was born I’d turned up all my hems. My mother was a bit surprised by this, she thought that now I was a married woman and a mother I would dress in a matronly way and the whole two inches of thigh I was showing was certainly none of those


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things, but she got used to it, and as usual I was the pioneer for my sisters to follow. Rosie was a hippie with her children, all long flowing dresses and hair, a flower child with her own flower children, and Brenda was as always extremely smart in clothes she bought for tiny fractions of their real price at sales, which she still does. Brenda is so tinny, we say, eyeing her newest stunning no-money purchase, echoing our father who was fond of that word.

* Graham used to say that when he went to King’s College in Cambridge in the late fifties it was the end of the nineteenth century, and you could say much the same thing of sea travel. There were planes but they were a lot more expensive, sea was the preferred mode. You’d think you’d get fat with this idle idyllic life and all that food but somehow we didn’t. We did play deck games when Lucy slept, there were baby monitors, and at night we used to dance. On Himalaya they would put the stabilisers in after midnight so the ship could go faster and that was great fun, it rolled energetically from side to side as it cleaved through the water and we slid from side to side of the dance floor with it. As I recall it was in a bar called The Boot and Piton that we used to dance, named in keeping with the ship. It was there I found out that ships’ names shouldn’t have the in front of them. But by 1972 when we came back on Canberra with our ham stand and Lucy’s Biba petticoat it was the very end of this form of travel. At earlier times the passengers were people who wanted to get from one place to another, but by Canberra a number of them were cruisers. They looked down on us, those people who were rich enough to take holidays sailing the seas, Southampton to Southampton in however many months, for however many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we people travelling with a purpose despised them as empty-headed lazybones with nothing better to do.


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In 1998 Graham and I went on a cruise: from Auckland to Sydney via Christchurch, Hobart and Adelaide on the QEII. It was a strange experience. I was invited as writer-in-residence and found it a bit odd, hardly anybody had any interest in my being there at all. I was on after lunch and a few dozens of sleepy people came and looked bemused. As we disembarked in Sydney I crossed the path of Arthur Hailey and I wondered if he would have more success with audiences than I. Possibly not, you don’t get rich by reading, not even bestsellers. We were in a classy cabin, quite enormous, with a giant bathroom and a walk-in wardrobe and a huge room to keep the suitcases in. One woman had twenty-six cases in there, the rest were in the hold. There was a hierarchy of dining rooms, according to the level of cabin, we were in the best. Women dressed for dinner in designer evening gowns, all glitter; we had a corner table in the window and the woman next door but one had the hugest diamond ring I have ever seen. It was as big as a sugar cube on her bony finger. She would move her hand languidly, it would send out beams like a lighthouse and a waiter came running. She was ancient and all the time we were there she never wore the same gown twice; they were all beaded and sparkly in brilliant gauzy colours. We talked to the waiters much more than to the other guests who knew we weren’t their financial equals. They recommended lovely food. The lamb we got in Christchurch today is superb, they said. And if you didn’t care for what was on the menu you just ordered foie gras or caviar. All we had to pay for was the wine, and since a modest Australian one cost more than half as much we drank some superb French ones, which was lovely, for Graham was already ill and quite frail, and he loved wine and knew an enormous amount about it, so he and the wine waiter would discuss what we should drink with the various dishes, and we’d order bottles of this and that and have a glass or two and then he’d reseal them. I still feel glad that Graham had that lovely wine-drinking experience—in fact I wish we had been more extravagant.


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But it was a sad trip, partly because we knew this was not our life, and partly because Graham, who first sailed to Europe on a scholarship passage in the fifties—he consorted with fellow students in economy, a terrible crime, and was informed by the captain that if it hadn’t been the middle of the Pacific he would have put him ashore—and loved that form of travel, wasn’t able to walk about and enjoy the world of the ship. It was as much as he could do to get up and dressed by lunchtime. We had a wheelchair and I would push him round a bit, but you had to take very long detours and go in strange ways to find lifts which tired him out, and there were always melancholy reminders of how his life had closed in. One of the best moments was being berthed in Sydney at the International Terminal and having a view of the Opera House; for some reason we had an extra night there. We took a taxi to the Art Gallery and saw an exhibition of Orientalism and that was great. It seems churlish to be so unenthusiastic about the voyage; in good health we’d have had a ball. And it did have its moments. In Christchurch we saw his family, everybody knowing it would be the last time, and in Hobart spent the day with Cassandra and Lucy who took us to Lucy’s house at Lower Snug for lunch. We sat on her deck and watched the water and drank bubbly wine. But apart from a friendly woman at the next table, from Florida, with whom we occasionally exchanged a word at mealtimes, and the staff who were interesting people seeing the world and having adventures, and liked to talk about their lives and plans and the exciting things they had done in port, I think the sense of the rich at play was a bit much for us. But the foie gras and caviar were nice.


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Passages of time

11 October 2002 The garden has gone from being thickly all over yellow with daffodils to densely blue, blue with forget-me-nots, a weed everyone says, but so beautiful, and pink and bluebells, and purplish honesty. The high bagged brick wall that has gone up next door I have learned to like. It looks like an old barn. It does if you squint at it. It is cosy and enclosing. I can choose what colour it will be painted. It is a blank canvas for the wonderful shifting shadows the branches of the trees cast over it. I think it may cosset my plants, provide a little microclimate for them. The startling red camellia, and the Cécile Brunner rose. The clematis just growing up the tripod I made for it from my own bamboo. The two plums have bloomed at the same time. After how many years? Seven, eight. The nurseryman who explained that I would need two for pollination said I could put them both in the same hole, but that seemed incestuous. Now I wish I had. Greengage and Golden Coe to mate with it. I have always wanted a greengage; I wonder is it because of the luscious words of Rumer Godden’s Greengage Summer, which I read when I was very young and forget everything about except the fact that I was so moved, so excited, by it. I gave greengages to Elinor in Spider Cup. This is the scene where her former lover surprises her by admiring her powers of negotiation:


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There’s a bowl of greengages on the table. She reaches out her hand and pinches the smooth bursting flesh. Negotiation. Greengage. She wishes the one word were as round and palpable and green as the other. That she could hold its meaning in her hand and pinch it. Bite into it with sharp teeth and feel its acid-sweet juices tingling in her mouth. Sometimes having a word like greengage is almost as good as the real thing, but then sometimes because the word is so good you desire the object. That’s why I planted the trees. To no avail, so far. This year I shall net my fruit trees. Last year the medlar was covered in fruit, and I constantly checked them, having read that they should be eaten at the exact moment when they begin to blet. One day, nearly ready. Next day, nothing. Not a sign. Not a rind, not a seed. Cockies would have left shreds. Possums, the little beasts. I shall net the plums and the medlar and maybe the quince. The fig too? The quince has blossomed and there should be fruit. I shall talk to Peter over the road, who has great jolly Greek parties, swarming up ladders and netting his fruit trees. I love to hear these suburbs musical with foreign languages. The people next door are from Georgia, their deep mournful accents sound like singing, ancient, immemorial, like Volga boatmen. In English every other word is fucken and maybe its equivalent is in Georgian but if so it sounds very beautiful.

14 December 2002 Neil has got a new recipe which he is pleased with so he invited us to dinner to try it. We sat in the garden on a warm evening and ate it with tiny vegetables that he had grown and Judy cooked. The turnips hardly bigger than grapes were wonderful.


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D u ck w i t h w i l d r i c e c u s t a r d s | (adapted from James McNair’s Stews and Casseroles). Brown one duck breast per person in olive oil, remove from pan, sauté an onion, gently melting it, and a clove of garlic. Neil made a brown roux, a sauce espagnole, a béchamel made with stock and simmered for four hours. The duck breasts are cooked in this, with extra stock, until tender; the sauce should be thinned if necessary, so it is the consistency of thin cream. Cook 1 cup wild rice in six cups of water and a bay leaf, and strain. Sauté a large onion, finely chopped, and 100 grams of mushrooms (shitake in this case—interesting ones are a good idea) in a tablespoon of unsalted butter, stir in rice, 2 tablespoons parsley, 1⁄4 cup freshly grated parmesan. Preheat oven to 175°. Warm 21⁄4 cups heavy cream (not thickened) with the zest of an orange, plus 2 cloves and 2 allspice berries, leave to steep, keeping warm. Lightly beat 4 egg yolks and 2 whole eggs together, strain the warm cream in. Season with salt and pepper. Butter and flour 6 soufflé dishes. Distribute rice mixture, then cream. Place in a baking dish and add 2 centimetres of boiling water, cover with foil and cook for about 45 minutes, or until a wooden skewer comes out clean. Rest a few moments then turn out on to a plate each, serve with the duck breasts, sprinkled with chives and orange zests, in a pool of the juice. Neil is a keen cook, and this is a grand dish, needing a certain time and trouble. For dessert he made a set piece, a croquembouche, a pyramid of little round choux pastries, filled with cream, stuck together with toffee and served with a crème bachique, a rich custard flavoured with Grand Marnier.


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22 January 2003 The guys over the road have been climbing ladders and clearing my gutters, blocking them up and filling them with water. Last Saturday there were general warnings at lunchtime of fires burning up through the national park but no need to panic, return to your home, a great many of the roads are closed, keep away, it is best to stay in your house, evacuate, secure your property ... what are you to believe? But then people looked out the window and there was an inferno on their doorstep. Next thing, some five hundred houses destroyed. I live in the one quarter of Canberra unthreatened by these vast uncontrollable fire fronts but there are warnings of possible evacuations in the next suburb. Canberra is often called a garden city but in fact it is the largest urban forest in the world. There are long ribbons of eucalypts threading through all of the suburbs, and it so hot so dry and the fires so fierce that they leap vast distances from tree to tree. Ash rains down from the sky and burning branches fall into gardens and on to roofs. People ring up and say, have you got your bags packed? What are you taking? I wander through my house in a kind of torpor. My study is full of bits of paper with things written on them; they all matter. Or none do. A friend of a friend got out of her house without even a handbag. She was transcribing her war-hero father’s diaries; she never knew him since he was killed before she was born and these documents are all she had of him. But she didn’t have time to rescue them. I think of photographs, but they are all over the place, some in albums, some in boxes on shelves and in cupboards. Marriage certificates, birth certificates? Diaries? Prizes? Paintings? Significant books, treasures for useful or sentimental reasons? Family stuff, silver, Granma’s plates, my mother’s beautiful embroidery, the woollen lace shawl Auntie Lou knitted for Lucy—as soon as you start you keep thinking of more things, and how can you choose one more than another? So I don’t choose any. I wander my house, smelling the fiery


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air, staring out at the dense absence of light, the smoke sucks all life out of the air and you can hardly breathe, waiting, thinking is this apocalypse, grand term perhaps but that’s what it feels like. I think, I am sure it will be all right, I am sure we are safe here. And wonder how those who have lost their houses can manage. I have the radio on all the time, which I never do, I like a quiet house so I can think and read and write, the local ABC is doing nothing but bushfires, and in between news and warnings and heart-warming tales of neighbourly kindness it talks to people whose houses are lost. A lot of them are exultant, they have understood that their own lives and those of their loved ones are all that matters, things however precious are just that, things. You realise that this is shock, the adrenaline rush to deal with disaster, but nevertheless it is so noble and good you want to weep, especially as you know it cannot last. A friend of James’s comes back from the coast with his wife and two small children to find their house destroyed. Good, he says, it was all rubbish, now we can start again.

29 January 2003 I wake in the night to hear dogs. A great many dogs, nearby, I haven’t heard them before. The RSPCA burnt down and a veterinary hospital, a lot of pets were lost. And then there are all the homeless ones. I lie in bed and hear them. They are not so much barking as wailing. A whole lot of different voices, full of pain, filling the smoky night with their calls. Refugees, I suppose they are, and what have they seen? Their voices plangent, sad, there are primitive yelps of fear, deep groans, high musical soprano songs, deep bell tollings, it’s as if each knows the score for making this twisted plaited rope of sound in the night. Periods of quietness, and then suddenly they all give voice in this dissonant unison. It’s strange and beautiful, partly terrible and partly because of its weird beauty comforting. The helicopters flying over at dawn to


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monitor the fires set them off. And I think earlier in the night there must be other warnings that only they can hear.

* There are donations of truckloads of sliced bread to make sandwiches for the homeless in various centres. Volunteers make homely food. The radio announcer says it might be nice if there were some flowers in these places to cheer people. An hour later she says, Please, please, don’t bring any more, we have far more than we know what to do with. Flowers, and sliced white bread sandwiches, just what you need in the circumstances.

7 May 2003 This has turned into a very intermittent diary. But I did net the fruit trees. Went on Peter’s advice to a rural store out at Hall and bought metres of coarse white woven net, and my gentleman caller climbed up the ladder and together we hauled them over. I can’t say I admire the look of netted trees. Strange ghostly presences in the garden. But then John says they look like brides of the earth, so that is a happier image. And they worked. Eight wonderful quinces, fat and juicy, and this is only the tree’s second year. A basketful of greengages: heavenly. One fig. Lucy and I had half each, it was sublime. I am afraid the tree is overshadowed by the ornamental quince next to it, the japonica. I cut it back savagely but this just makes it grow bigger and thicker. Still it is only a second year for the fig too so maybe it will fight back. The medlar is still netted. It’s sad you can’t see them, the fruit are so pretty, brown with little crowns. I read somewhere that people lost interest in medlars when more glamorous fruit like peaches and apricots became available, and medlars were thought to be dull. We shall see. It is a beautiful tree, a present from my sister and brother-in-law


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after Graham died, to put in the garden that’s a memorial to him. It is a medieval tree, said Fred; that is why they chose it, Graham being a medievalist. It has the loveliest white simple flowers in spring, like enamelled flowers in a paradise garden. What to do with quinces? If they are bulgy and lumpy you can make them into a jelly, since you chop them coarsely and don’t worry about coring and peeling.

Q u i n c e J el ly | Wash quinces, rubbing off the fur. Cut into quarters, or eighths, leaving skin on and cores in. Pack into a saucepan, cover with water, simmer very gently until really soft. That’s the easy bit, no peeling or coring. Now the fiddle. Strain through muslin—you can buy it by the metre, I use double thickness. You stand a chair upside down on a table, fasten the muslin to the chair legs, put a bowl on the seat and ladle the pulp through. I used tough rubber bands to hold the cloth. You mustn’t touch it, just let it drip, overnight. If you poke or prod or push it the jelly will cloud. Measure the juice, add cup for cup of sugar (I tend to use slightly less) and cook till it sets. Test by putting a little on a cold saucer and in the fridge for a couple of minutes, or use a sugar thermometer: 120°–121° centigrade. It’s a marvellous dark jewel red colour, and with an equally dark rich flavour. This recipe also works very well with the funny little fruits from the japonica. And John and I made a lot of delicious apple jelly with the fruit from his trees, which was pretty mothy and battered and misshapen. We chopped them roughly, discarding the damaged bits. Crab apples are fine too. My quinces are fresh and tender—I wonder is it because they are off a young tree? So they are very good cut into slices, not peeled, and baked in the oven with honey.


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B a k e d q u i n c e s w i t h h o n ey | Wash the fur off two quinces, dry, cut into quarters and core, then into thick slices. Put into an ovenproof dish. Drizzle with two tablespoons of honey, sprinkle over two tablespoons of verjuice, dot with one or two tablespoons of butter in pats. Add a little water and cook in a slow oven, 150 degrees, for an hour or until cooked. Keep an eye to make sure they don’t dry out completely, there should be a little sticky juice; add water if it disappears. This worked for tender quinces; if they are tough and seem to be slow in cooking and drying out you could cover them with foil to finish cooking. Again, this is not a strict recipe. You can add more honey if you like sweetness, and more butter for extra richness. Quinces are wonderful in this next dish, which I had only ever made with apples before. It’s a medieval dish, like an eggy pie without the crust, or a quince frittata. Q u i n c e t a n s y | You can cook the quinces early on, and add the eggs at the last minute. Four quinces, quartered peeled and sliced—if they are young and tender, no need to peel them. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a shallow heavy-based pan and cook the quinces gently until they are tender. Sprinkle them with some sugar early on so that they caramelise a little—really all these quantities are a matter of personal taste. Beat four eggs with a cup of cream and pour into the quinces. Cook until it begins to set, sliding it off the bottom of the pan as for an omelette. When it is beginning to set nicely slide it under a hot grill for a few minutes, until the top sets too, and puffs and browns. A custard, a pancake, an omelette, a pastry-less tart—it’s all these things, a marvellous easy dish, light and delicious.


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Nancy who is my garden colleague, but much grander than me, she remembers Latin names and grows unusual and special plants, whereas I am grateful if the simplest and most common things flourish, Nancy tells me about eating quinces when she was a child. They are associated for her with Empire Day, May 24, Queen Victoria’s birthday, when fireworks were not illegal and neither were bonfires. They used to put quinces in the embers of the bonfire and when they were cooked split them in halves and spread butter and sugar on them and eat them out of the skins. Before the days of silver foil; the thick quince skin protected the tender flesh. This is one of her dearest memories, and I can understand why. The quinces were delicious, and of course people would have grown them, they were a simple, inexpensive, available treat, but wonderful. You can hardly regret the passing of Empire Day, but fireworks and quinces baked in bonfires, they belong to a golden age of memory. When the world was different. When you were allowed to have fires in the street—the whole magic of autumn in the scent of burning leaves— and there was a vacant block for a bonfire and people could let off fireworks without coming to bad ends. We seem to be breeding a generation of hopelessly inefficient children. They fall over cracks in the pavement and their parents sue councils, they cannot be allowed to catch buses or ride bikes anywhere on their own, they are forbidden to wander about and play in that fecund mysterious imagination-developing way. Our neighbours’ children are not like this, they do all these things, they are old-fashioned—and they play soccer in the street. As my children did, well, it was cricket, and all the local kids. It’s a loop street not a thoroughfare, but cars do use it; the kids just get out of the way and wait for them to pass. Is it dangerous? No more than sleeping in your own bed, as any number of children abducted from cosy family homes and murdered bear witness.

*


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You have to wonder if plants are conscious of affection. The greengages produced a basketful of fruit this year, which burst in the mouth with all the warmth and sunny syrupy generosity of summer. Was it because they felt loved? That netting them against the possums was a sign of affection, which they liked so much they bloomed and fruited?

* I wish my possums would go and live somewhere else. They are very cute with their big-eyed solemn anthropomorphic faces—they all look like Audrey Hepburn—but they are monsters. Ravaging. I bought a flourishing sorrel from the Bundanoon nursery and planted it in a big square terracotta pot. The possums stripped all the leaves overnight. I covered it with an upside-down hanging basket (my own possum-preventing invention, the garden is full of them) and as soon as the leaves grew again the little beasts cast the basket off and gobbled them all up. I fastened the basket down with a number of metal and wooden sticks but they kicked those away. Poor old Sid, the terracotta dragon from Indonesia, is repeatedly raped by them. He has a hole in his tummy through which I put a stick to hold him sturdy to the ground, but I keep finding him tossed on his back at some distance from his usual place. I planted succulents; next morning they were all gone. The beasts waited until the cyclamen plants in a pot got really flourishing, then ate them. I bought some cassia bark which I am supposed to stew up and strain and make a spray to keep them away, but haven’t done it yet— maybe I have no faith in it working. I had a man come and get them out of the roof, by making one-way traps over their exit holes so they could get out but not back in again. This took a while because they kept finding new holes. But I think they are out of the roof now, though they still gallop over it like racing wombats. I thought they’d all go somewhere else when they couldn’t get inside, but no such luck.


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You can buy possum to eat in Canberra, little frozen carcasses that look like cats, but they come from Tasmania. They are protected here. You can’t even catch them and take them somewhere else, like a kilometre away. The dictum is, this is their habitat. This is where they belong. Nonsense, say I. When I came to live in this house the tallest piece of vegetation for miles around was a paspalum stalk, the trees are all planted by me, they are my habitat. The possums saw their chance and moved in. Into my oak trees. It is not their native place at all. I wouldn’t begrudge them this, did they not have such disgusting habits. I wish they’d learn to eat acorns, and not my choice plants, my lovely little true geraniums, the oxlip, the parsley. They feast on the most expensive greens in the world, do my possums. A $10 plant, gone in a minute. For a little while I was finding dead possums in my backyard. I think this might have been after Transact put their cable in, the possums walked along it and somehow touched the electricity wires and got electrocuted. They’ve become more clever since. The first dead body, and possums are very large looking and quickly very smelly when they’re dead, rather freaked me out. I rang up a friend. She said, Well, you’ve just written in The Fog Garden about a woman who puts a dead animal in the hole before planting her flowering bushes, why don’t you do that? So I did. Albertine, a very prickly rose which I chose for its Proustian connections, seems to be doing very well on it. And so does a camellia. I was at a literary festival in Tasmania, on a panel talking about gardening (as you do) and mentioned this dead animal in the hole. I learned about it from the ABC gardening program, the story was of a garden in Western Australia, marvellously blooming in the desert. The trouble is, I said, the program doesn’t say what the animal is. Is it a cow, or is it a mouse? A rabbit, a dog? A cat? Is it killed for the purpose, in a kind of ritual sacrifice? Or are you using one that happens to have died?


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One of my audience said she knew the presenter of the program, she’d find out. She sent me an email. It was a sheep, she said. The property was a sheep farm, and it was dead sheep that caused this desert garden to blossom like the rose. I was nevertheless quite pleased when possums stopped dropping dead in my backyard. You need a big hole for even quite a small possum and I have run out of room. Speaking of sorrel, I found some flourishing in punnets at the local greengrocer. Not for planting, said the woman, but for garnishing. You cut it and serve it with food. And she told me how she puts it on pizza. Sorrel, with garlic and olive oil. Oh, I said, and do you use tomato, or cheese? She laughs. Maybe. My husband is Italian, she says. Pizza! With ham and pineapple! What a joke. Hastily I agree with her. My favourite is napoletana, I tell her, with anchovies and olives. She approves of this. Do you have a pizza oven in the backyard, I ask. Not yet, but her husband has plans. You can cook not just pizzas, she says, but roasts, so juicy. Nancy’s Italian neighbours, up on the mountain, have a marvellous big brick oven in the garden. They make their bread in it, and sometimes give her some, it’s good. On 13 June there is St Anthony’s bread, baked for the church, they always give her some of that. Nancy has searched the Internet for the why of it, but cannot find it; plenty of recognition of its existence, and that it is bread baked in quantities so that some may be given to the poor and the desolate, or at least to others, but no good reason why it should be associated with St Anthony. Maybe the bread is offerings made in thanksgiving for blessings received through prayers to him, whose main job is to find lost things, though he is also patron of the poor, and barren and pregnant women. Nancy’s neighbour cannot say why she does it, just that it is always done. St Anthony’s bread, she says, as though that explains everything.


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13 May 2003 The autumns seem to get longer and longer. This one is particularly gorgeous, slow and still. Whatever the drought has done, this must be its gift. I always think of Canberra autumns as painted, because they are usually windless, unlike the spring, which is a mad tearing raggedy season, strewing excessively pretty blossoms everywhere. But this year is somehow tremulous. As though the drought has terrified the trees with threats of their own mortality, and this is a brave face they’re putting on. The brightest trees have lost only some of their leaves, and those that are left are particularly luminous, the light shines through them with this glowing trembling quality. And then sometimes the light is quite sharp, it’s as though the trees are hung with mirrors, in among their coloured leaves, and they all slowly shift and glitter in a marvellous display of dying. Endless sweeping of leaves. A clear space for a moment, and then they litter down again. My New Zealand mother-in-law wouldn’t have trees because of the mess they make. She liked her gardens swept and tidy. I look at the bags of leaves already collected, and the number still to fall, and feel overwhelmed. But I would never get rid of the trees. The tomato bushes that I planted in tubs—because Judy said, We’ve got two plants left over, would you like them?—and wrapped round with green plastic trellis to keep the resident monsters out, have finished ripening, I think. We had a few perfect tomatoey tomatoes off them. I am wondering if I can make green tomato pickle with the rest. This is one of the great good things in life, and very difficult to find. Even more difficult to get right. I have managed to find three pots lately. One from the Old Courthouse at Boorowa (I bought some fine padded coathangers as well, the country arts are not quite dead), one from the Farmer’s Market in Cowra, along with verjuice and quails’ eggs and goat cheese and marvellous great sheaves of greeny-white gladioli, and one from the Old Railway Station in Bungendore, which


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is still a functioning railway station several times a day, when the Canberra–Sydney trains are running that is, and not stopped by dodgy bridges or the evil machinations of New South Wales politics. They were all very good in their utterly different ways, but a bit too chutneyish for my liking. Good green tomato pickle is that, pickle, it shouldn’t be all stuffed about with raisins and such sweet things. Well, I decided that three small tomatoes were hardly the stuff of a decent pickle. But here is a good recipe, from an old lady in Wagga, who has been presenting my sister with pots of it for years. Everybody agrees, it does just what a good green tomato pickle should do. I haven’t been able to make it myself but I’ve eaten it and it’s good. A real pickle, nothing wimpy about it, none of that sweet puddingy fruit, it’s tart and tough. Chewy. Some sourdough bread and a bit of good yellow cheese with this pickle and there’s lunch.

J o a n To o h ey’s gre e n t o m a t o p i ck l e s

Ingredients: 3lbs Green Tomatoes 3lbs Onions 3 tablespoons Mustard 1⁄ 2 tablespoon Turmeric 3 3⁄ 4 cups Sugar

1 teaspoon Allspice 1 teaspoon Curry Powder 1 cup Flour 2 pints Draught Vinegar

Method: Cut Tomatoes and Onions. Cover with Water and 1⁄4lb Salt Let stand over night Boil and strain off brine Put Sugar in Vinegar and bring to boil. Put in Vegetables Mix dry ingredients to a paste with some of the Vinegar Stir into pickles and simmer for 10 minutes.


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Variations of ingredients (if liked) as well or instead: Chokoes Cauliflower Capsicum Zucchini Chillies Green Ginger The one I am eating has cauliflower and green crisp beans in it. Mrs Toohey is in her eighties and the recipe is on a scrap of old crinkled grey much-worn paper. But it has the ring of truth to it.

25 May 2003 I have just eaten my first ever medlar. Back from the Sydney Writers’ Festival, wandering round the garden, glad to be home as I always am, in the chilly air and the high sunshine of this wintry country. I checked the medlars, they were still hard; should I pick them and make jelly? The net is full of yellow fallen leaves which I sift through, finding one hard and one soft, bletted, fruit. Take it inside and Lucy and I have half each. Tentatively. Do I want to eat this, asks Lucy of the squishy brownish scrap of flesh I hand her. Of course, I say, with that motherly firmness that the sharp child swiftly learns means you haven’t a clue. It’s many decades since Lucy was fooled by it. But she tries the fruit. So do I. It’s delicious. Sharp, slightly, astringent, yet sweet and creamy too. A bit like a good root vegetable, with that earthy taste that is strong and sweet at the same time, mysterious and not simple. With something of the texture and quality though not exactly flavour of cooked quince. People stopping eating them because they aren’t as nice as peaches must have been mad. They are not so summery and seductive, but they have their own deliciousness. And anyway there are no peaches, thank god, at this time of year. I don’t want fruits available all the time, their absence is part of their charm—there have been Californian cherries in the markets, at fabulous expense, friends say they are nice, but I don’t want to eat them, I want cherries to mean summer and Christmas coming, trucks parked on the roadside verges offering boxes of them straight from the orchards of Young.


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I’ll leave the other medlars on the tree, and watch the hard fallen one to see if it ripens, then maybe I will pick them all. Nerve-racking, for the novice grower; it would be nice to know the right thing to do. Nevertheless, I recommend: plant a medlar. Especially if you live enviably possum free. I have mine for its name, its beauty, its enamellike flowers, its medieval associations. What a bonus to find it tasting so good too.


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Sweetmeats

Here is a curious story. It happens on a tram in Vienna, the one that goes round and round the ring road that encloses the tiny central city—you can walk across in a short space of time—and separates it from the vast areas of apparently anonymous suburbs, which to the millions who live there have the specificity of home but are of only intermittent interest for tourists. I had been visiting a friend who lives behind an enormous wooden door in a courtyard at the back of the cathedral, you push it open and there you are in a small old street where Mozart once lived. I was taking the tram mainly for sightseeing reasons, so I could travel around the city and enjoy it, and also because I am fond of them, in my childhood I used to catch the old toast-rack trams between Merewether Beach where I lived and the city. On my own at quite a tender age I was allowed to make this trip. We were all upset when the trams were taken off and the tramlines ripped up in favour of buses, which had numbers to indicate their destinations; how would we ever remember them? But it turned out quite easy to remember: 207 it was, I shall never forget. Anyway, I am in a Viennese tram travelling round the Ringstrasse and a young woman gets on. She sits next to me. I imagine that she is a tourist too, since she has a guide book. She looks out the window and down at the book and says something to me in German. I shake my


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head and shrug my shoulders, with a little apologetic twitch of the lips, I think it is rude not to speak the local language, but there, I don’t. Ah, she says, vous êtes Française? Well, of course, I am flattered by this, how good to look so glamorous, but I reply, in the same language, that no, alas, I am not a Frenchwoman, I am Australian. This seems to please her, she nods, and says, But you speak French, and I say, Well, more or less, and so we have a conversation. She is Italian, called Francesca, and the conversation is a little odd because my accent is not good and neither is hers though she speaks fast, with impressionistic or maybe it is Italianate syntax, and occasionally we get confused, looking at one another with puzzled eyes and bursting into laughter. So there is a certain amount of guesswork in this my account of what she said as we rode round the city of Vienna, several times, since its circumference is not large. We know we are in the city of cakes, of coffee houses baroquely gothic and gothically baroque, as lavish with gilding as they are with cream. She asks me do I know a certain kind of cake, or sweetmeat might be the word, the best in the world, she says. She describes these delicacies: a roll, or perhaps a cylinder, of cake, very fine but moist, not fluffy, tasting of rich bitter oranges and almonds, oozing with syrup. She shows me how you eat them, head tossed back, eyes closed in bliss, sucking the juice from your fingers, rolling out your tongue to catch the last drops. The people on the tram look at her curiously, then turn their eyes away. Even if they understand French and I am not sure how much I do at this moment they might not know what she is talking about. Francesca is a pretty woman, rosy, with rosy cheeks and lips that are remarkable because they are highly coloured without being painted and dark curly hair and lashes that sweep her cheeks when she imitates ecstasy. These cakes must be something if they are the best in the world. Their name seems to be Alexander—she calls them les Alexandres au sirop, syrupy Alexanders, sticky Alexanders.


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S w e e t m e a t s | 87

You mean as in Alexander the Great, I say, the conqueror of the known world? Ah yes, indeed, and it may be that he brought them back from Persia, or perhaps India. Though there is a version with a kind of brandy cream, and that does not seem likely from that part of the world. The syrupy sugary bit, yes. And oranges are Arab fruits. But brandy, no. I imagine a secret garden, enclosed by a high wall, intricately patterned with flowers and fruit trees like an oriental carpet, where languid women with plump erotic little rolls of flesh feed themselves sweet cakes of orange and almond. But not brandy. Brandy and cream, that sounds like brandy alexanders, I say, but this puzzles her. A cocktail, I explain. I try calling it un cognac alexandrine. You mean it is a kind of poem, she says, and there we are, laughing our heads off on this staid Viennese tram. I want to quote Pope’s mimicking line about the six-footed alexandrine—and come to think of it, he is an Alexander too—‘Which like a wounded snake drags its slow length along’ but naturally I can’t on the spot translate it into metrically identical French, and anyway the French like alexandrines, the metre, it is their classical form. I tell her vaguely how you make the drink, vaguely since I haven’t had one since my venturesome and ironclad youth, but she doesn’t like the sound of it. Too rich, too sickly. A ruin of good cognac. Well, I say, probably ordinary potato brandy, improved, not ruined. Some people say, she says, that les alexandres came from Russia, and that they are named after one of the tsars. But she likes better the idea that they come from Alexandria. The monks in the library, she says, I find amusing to think the monks ate them to fortify themselves for the task of minding the books. A pity we can’t examine the pages for traces of sticky fingers. Ah, had it not burned down, of course. I would like to have the recipe, I say.


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Oh, it is best to find a shop that sells them, I think it is a secret recipe. But where? Not in Vienna, you said. No, not in Vienna. Maybe, you have to invent your own? Where do you get them from? Francesca laughs, and suddenly stands up and jumps off the tram, just as it is pulling away from the stop. She runs off in the direction of the Prater and its great ferris wheel, made famous by The Third Man movie, waving her hand over her shoulder. Alexandres au sirop. Long cylindrical cakes, or rolls, oozing with juice. Tasting of oranges and almonds. Named after a tsar, or a world conqueror, or a library, the great Greek library of Alexandria. At least, I think that’s what she said. I may have got it wrong. Or I may have got it right, and she made it all up. But that’s the risk with stories. Especially from foreigners on trams. Though sometimes, embedded within them, is a clue to their honesty, or no.

* And the recipe? I do have one for a sticky rich orange cake which I love because it is a perfect lazy woman’s cake. It’s also an example of how recipes do not belong to a single person, how they are the property of everyone. Stephanie Alexander might tell you how to stuff a duck neck with tripe to make a brilliant sausage but finally it is only the words that are hers. She did not invent the idea or the process, although this particular way of doing it may have been devised by her. If I copy her exact words I am plagiarising, but if I make her recipe and write down what I do in my own words, well, then it is my recipe. Infuriating for people who really are inventive with recipes, but actually rather important, I think, the idea that they belong to everybody, you can’t copyright the doing, only the words.


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Certain jealous secretive women were supposed to subvert this by giving you a recipe but leaving out a vital ingredient but I think this is mean. If you give a recipe it should be in good faith. I happened to mention to my friend Carmel that I had eaten a delicious cake which had been made from boiled oranges. I’ve got that, she said, and emailed me the recipe. From: carmel bird To: marion halligan Date: Saturday, 5 May 2001 5:16 PM Subject: passover cake 2 small oranges 4 eggs 100 grams ground almonds 125 grams caster sugar half heaped teaspoon baking powder 2 tabs marmalade This makes two cakes—or one cake joined with marmalade. Butter and line with paper two cake tins Wash oranges then boil them for 2hrs Put oranges in blender and pulp Beat eggs and sugar until pale and thick Mix all ingredients and stir 180 degrees for one hour Loosen the sides of the cake and leave to cool. The cake will subside. You can put marmalade in the middle and join the two if you want to. Before serving, sprinkle with icing sugar.


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This has to be seen as a masterpiece of economical instruction. I have now made it a number of times, and have some comments. Big oranges are good. You can boil them the day before. Take care they do not boil dry. (This is experience speaking.) The marmalade does not go in cake but between. At first remembering my mother’s advice to fold dry ingredients into batter I did so, but now I beat the eggs, rain the sugar in slowly, beat for quite a while, then rain the almonds in, the flour and baking powder, beat for a few seconds, turn off the machine, put in pureed oranges, and beat till just mixed. This seems to stop the cake subsiding. The twice I have done it like this the cakes have been beautifully flat on top. (I say ‘rain’ as a translation of the French expression to pour ingredients dans une pluie, in a rain, i.e. slowly and steadily.) Make sure you cook them for a whole hour. My oven is hot so I do them on 170°. After three-quarters of an hour they look well browned so I cover them with brown paper and leave the full time. I don’t use icing sugar. Notice Carmel calls this a Passover Cake. I have also seen versions called Jewish Orange Cake. The enigmatic Francesca didn’t mention this particular origin for her alexanders, but the cake would seem to be rather like the one she describes. Claudia Roden in Mediterranean Cookery has a similar cake, only instead of putting the fruit in the batter you just use a little zest, and make a syrup to pour over it out of the juice of three oranges, some orange liqueur and sugar. You pierce the cake with little holes and keep pouring the syrup over until it is really soaked. This is a Spanish recipe—I wonder if it perhaps has Moorish connections—my walled garden with plump maidens and syrupy sweetmeats? Or perhaps again Jewish; there is a Sephardic Orange Cake which is quite similar. Its name is Tarta de Naranja, reminding us on the one hand that ‘orange’ comes from Arabic and on the other that it is a word like apron, which


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used to begin with an ‘n’ until the letter migrated to the article before it—there you can see the connection of napron with napery—and so instead of saying ‘a norange’ we say ‘an orange’. Children often still ask if they can have a norange.


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Novel food

At one point in my writing career I decided: No more food. From now on, my fiction would be foodless. I found I couldn’t do it. Quite impossible. The kind of novels I write need food. A bit like bodies, really. To be solid, and substantial, and properly fleshed out, there’s nothing like a good feed. Or possibly a bad one. Since food is something that we all know a good deal about, and indeed have an intimate relationship with several times a day, it’s a language we all speak, so it is a good way of expressing human relations. Suppose we have a situation where a man is interested in a woman. Or vice versa. One invites the other to a meal. There are numerous possible scenarios. A very elegant restaurant, with red velvet drapes, chandeliers, waiters who are both obsequious and patronising, thick carpets muting the air. A Pizza Hut. A post-modern glass and stainless steel shell where voices echo from bare walls, and the menu mixes Thai with Lebanese and granny food, calling it fusion cuisine. A picnic on the edge of the water, with local oysters, black bread and unsalted butter, a fresh white wine and a cool sea breeze. A suburban Italian trattoria, with pasta and cheap chianti. A Chinese–Australian café in a remote country town. A hamburger in the park.


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Add to this your characters. A shy young man who’s saved his money for this occasion. A young woman who’s never been to a restaurant before. An older man used to buying what he wants. A woman who knows that food is the most poignant way to express love, and is on the point of committing adultery. A man who plans to ask a woman to marry him. A man who has only just decided he is gay. Put them into these scenarios, watch how they behave in expected or unexpected situations, and you have immense possibilities for comedy and tragedy, but above all for understanding the human condition. This is not about local colour, adding a bit of atmosphere, setting a scene, though all those things may be happening, it’s about the way we make sense of our lives. The great occasions of our existence are marked by meals. The archetypal events have their ritual feasts, or at least eating occasions. If not births—though they may be toasted in sparkling wine—then christenings, and birthdays, marriages, deaths. They have their wedding breakfasts, their wakes after funerals, their courting dinners in dim restaurants. But because they are common to a whole society they tend to lack the kind of memorable detail that you need to capture the individuality of a life. Unless they go disastrously wrong, and the food plays its role in a tragedy—or a comedy. But emotion can mean that the person living through these dramatic moments may have no memory of them. I have written about a meal I had at Romano’s, or maybe it was the Trocadero, you see I can’t remember which, only that it was one or the other of these grand nightclub-style dining places, like something out of a Fred and Ginger movie. I was taken by a beautiful Chinese man from Sarawak who was going back home after studying in Australia. We were in love, we believed, and were going to get married one day. I remember the exquisite sadness of this meal, the pain of the parting, and afterwards walking sorrowfully through the streets of Sydney, hand in hand,


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star-crossed lovers with nowhere to go, too well-brought up to do more than kiss chastely. I remember nothing at all about the food we ate. Would Juliet have been able to describe her meals with Romeo, supposing she had any? But if I were to write this scene in a novel I would pay attention to the food, in some way. Either it would be so poignantly delicious that it would be an emblem of the love that consumed us, or disgusting, just another cruel blow of fate. Or we would only toy with a little quail (an anachronism at the time I would think, more likely we’d have been eating a tournedos—pronounced tornado like the wind—Rossini, fillet steak on a slab of liver pâté), barely managing a mouthful of the superb cut-with-a-spoon beef, the soggy beans, the baked potato with sour cream and chives and crumbled bacon, having in our sorrow no appetite. But the point is, the finding of the right food to give verisimilitude, vigour, explicitness, or poignancy, or irony, to the tale is the job of the artist: the novelist, the biographer, the autobiographer, whose imagination gives shape and energy to the story she is telling. In other words, it is more likely to be a matter of art than memory. A colleague of mine read my novel Spider Cup in manuscript. Too much food, Marion, she said; I think you should go through and cut most of it out. Since it was in manuscript, I tried. I discovered I couldn’t do it, not because of my fondness for my sensuously written descriptions of food, but because without it the novel fell apart. Food was structurally necessary to the book’s shape. Almost as though it was a kind of skeleton, without which the book fell into a blubbery mass. And everybody knows and I am always saying that meat tastes better on the bone. My heroine Elinor in Spider Cup has run away to France because her husband says he’s leaving her. At first she eats mainly bread and cheese and drinks a lot of wine, so she has nightmares as red as the wine she has


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drunk, of slitting the wrists and ankles of the young woman her husband has fallen in love with. This especially barbarous fate is because there is a story belonging to the village she is living in, of its duke murdering his wife on the grounds of her adultery, sending her on a pilgrimage through the woods, ordering her litter attacked by masked men, and his surgeon to open her veins, leaving her to bleed to death. One day Elinor goes to the market and sees all the local food laid out, an image of the ordered life, seasonal, and with rules—it’s illegal to sell wild trout, for instance—and the lore of centuries of careful husbandry. She buys tomatoes and a pot of basil, and on the way home sits on a drystone wall in the sun and puts a basil leaf and a tomato into her mouth: ‘Its large warm ripeness burst against her tastebuds and the juices flowed. It seemed like the first basil, the first tomato, she had ever tasted.’ And so now will her life be something to taste afresh and as if new. Earlier, in Paris, she had gone to a market where rich thrifty ladies did their shopping, and looked at all the different sorts of olives: ‘fat green ones, small black ones with hot chillies, herby ones, garlicky; cracked, crinkled, dried, split, stuffed; Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and the large violet ones from Tunisia’. She remembers buying such treats and bringing them home, unwrapping them in front of her husband, him fetching wine to drink, the transaction a ritual which always delighted them. Elinor stands in front of the olive stall and weeps because this will never happen again. In The Fog Garden, the phrase, ‘and the large violet ones from Tunisia’, makes my heroine Clare think of her own lost husband, lost to death not desertion; she reads the passage aloud ‘and knows her audience feels that all the heartbreak of the husband’s loss is in that line, and all the more so because it is mysterious that it should be’. I’m certainly talking about olives here, the delicious berries that so many of us love to eat. It’s important that they should be present in their full fleshly splendour. But I’m not just talking about olives, there are love and death and betrayal, all the more cruel, the more poignant,


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because they are embodied in a small domestic delicacy. Which is also a bearer of heavy symbols of its own, for olive trees take a long time to develop and bear fruit, so destroying your enemy’s olive trees is not like knocking down his house or burning his wheat crop, you will have deprived him of his livelihood for years to come. That is why olives suggest peace, why they are such potent symbols of continuity and thrift and the good life. And of course they produce olive oil which is not just a staple food and the definer of its culture, but also useful for lamps and for rubbing into the skin and making soap. That’s why I can’t leave food out of my books. It is where the real dramas of the human condition enact themselves. I’ve tried sometimes but it has always turned out to be impossible. So when I started writing The Point, I thought, well, it’s set in a restaurant, it will be really and thoroughly about food. It will be the whole theme and pattern of the book. Well, it is and it isn’t. Flora, who was meant to be the heroine but never quite manages it, she is far too damaged by the loss of her vigorous little baby boy to cot death, is obsessed with finding the perfect dish. Not because she wants to eat it, she doesn’t care much for eating, though she likes to drink wine, but as an idea, an act of the imagination. This obsession causes the catastrophic climax of the novel. The food she cooks is amazing, rare, erudite, serious. Not much fun. Her picnic is almost bizarrely austere: parmesan cheese, bread, olive oil and pears. All perfect of course. With superb wine, on and in and with handsome plates, glasses, napkins. Later she is cooking a banquet for the Slow Food movement, which I think is a wonderful idea, basically, although it is also a hobby of the rich, and that is something to be thought of, not rejected, but considered. I do feel there is something a bit immoral about too much attention paid to food. Enough, yes, it is important to have respect. But obsession is another matter. And I would much rather write a novel where these things are to be thought about as the preoccupations


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of my characters than construct some sort of serious essay balancing the whys and wherefores. A lot of the food is ambiguous. It comes out of the garbage. It’s the rejects of rich diner’s plates. When the vagrant Clovis and the parolebreaker Gwyneth are eating it, she says it tastes much nicer in this discarded state than in the restaurant. No, says Clovis, it doesn’t, and they have an argument, he trying to tell her that she only thinks it does, because she is happier here, it is actually much more delicious hot and fresh and on a plate, not mishmashed and cold. But she can’t listen to what he is saying. Finally he tells her she is proof of the Bible’s statement: ‘better a dinner of herbs where love is ...’; he can’t quite remember the whole quotation. That is I think one of the most significant moments in the book. Better a dinner of herbs where love is ... It’s what we all in our hearts know. That the simplest of food with people we love will give us more pleasure than the most glamorous of meals where love isn’t. Of course sometimes it is nice to have love and glamour, but only sometimes.

* I was a good churchgoer in my youth and sat through a great many Methodist sermons. I even put my glasses on so I could hear them better. They were very fond of making parallels, as though saying at great length that one thing was like another would somehow reveal a marvellous truth. Like politicians, who think that talking about level playing fields will make you believe life is a game, with rules. Of course novelists do it too, but usually with more honourable intention. The Methodist sermons and the improving tracts handed out were fond of long analogies, in the form often of parables or allegories, which were meant to illuminate life for you, and convert you to their way of thinking. One irresistible image is the idea of life as a banquet. The great banquet of life. Here we all are, sitting down. The glasses are lined up in


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sparkling rows, the linen is white and starched, the napkins flicked open in our laps, a dainty posy in a vase. The menu is brought. What shall we order? Foie gras and caviar? Pheasant under glass? Larks’ tongues? Sausages and mash? Sheep’s eyes on saffron rice? In a religious parable we should be asking for a holy life, good works, faith, knowing the Lord. The bread and wine of the eucharist ... And in material terms? A brilliant career? Money, power; sex, love, children, Impressionist paintings, happiness ...? We should be so lucky, you might say. It’s much less likely to be a marvellous banquet than a modest restaurant that our life sets us down in. The menu is set price, there are only a few choices. Beef or chicken. Or vegetarian if you ordered it earlier. No foie gras, or truffles, no boar’s head en gelée or turtle soup. Water to drink, or coke. Maybe a little vin ordinaire. Nothing in the way of choice vintages. Or maybe there is no menu to order from, it is all back to front, as in Martin Amis’s novel about the holocaust, Time’s Arrow, where events start at the end and go back to their beginnings. So a meal may begin with vomiting, then indigestion, through the desert back to the entrée, and only then is the menu brought, only then can we see, when it is all over, what it is that we have been eating, what it is that we have been doing. Possibly we will be surprised when we read it. Is that what nourished us, we will say to ourselves. I had no idea that is what I was feeding on. Most of us would be foolish to believe our lives are going to be a banquet. (Like people who believe in reincarnation, supposing themselves to have been in a past life Cleopatra, or Alexander the Great, rather than the slave building the pyramid or the skivvy emptying the slops, which is where probability would put them.) Much more likely to be a cafeteria, glaringly lit and greasy, where we queue to choose from dishes we don’t want. Where we eye the dispiriting plates and wonder, which is the least unattractive? Maybe the response to all this is, why not get into the kitchen and


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cook your own meal, fate, whatever? Take control, concoct your own dishes, and don’t be so silly as to live in an apartment without a kitchen.

* Several times I was invited to Food and Wine Writers’ festivals in Adelaide, part of Tasting Australia. They were by no means so grand and glossy and televised as Tasting Australia itself, but they were immensely interesting. It was there that I heard Cheong Liuw talk about killing pigeons, how you had to do it with respect and indeed love, a most moving account which I put into The Fog Garden. One of my panels was called ‘Tell me what you cook and I’ll tell you what you read’. I think we were supposed to be talking about cookbooks, but I decided to discuss novels. It was part of my theme that food in novels is never simply vicarious, it’s essential to the experience of the work of art. I began with a list. There’s something elemental, something archetypal, about a list. I read it out slowly—essential, you have to savour a list—and paused after the food description, the telling what you cook, as though to give people a chance to provide the answer, the what is being read. Here it is: Burnt and congealed fatty lamb chops ... The Vivisector, Patrick White. Pork kidney, faintly deliciously scented with urine ... Ulysses, James Joyce. Pizza reheated in the microwave for breakfast ... any young grunge writer. Bungaree trout, that is, potatoes battered and fried ... Illywhacker, Peter Carey. Carefully washed liver ... Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth. Boeuf en daube ... To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.


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A pie made of cut-up children, cooked in a pastry case, and served to their mother your enemy ... Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare. The leftovers of somebody else’s cooking, to stuff your face and make you fat ... Lilian’s Story, Kate Grenville. Anything you like, provided you vomit it up afterwards ... The River Ophelia, Justine Ettler. Flounder with dill sauce and cucumber ... the eponymous novel by Günther Grass. Madeleine dipped in lime tea ... In Search of Lost Time, Proust. A pennyworth of bread accompanied by an intolerable deal of sack ... Henry IV Part 1, William Shakespeare. Saumon en papillote ... The Golden Dress. The interesting thing about this list is that a very large proportion involves images of ugliness, difficulty, horror, disgust. Of things going wrong, going bad, gone bad. Literally, but metaphorically too. This might be because fiction needs things to go wrong, otherwise there is no narrative. You can’t write a perfectly happy story, nothing happens, it’s very boring. I tried once, in a short story called ‘The Hanged Man in the Garden’, and it was so unbearably smug I had to offer an image of destruction at the end, though it was only a presentiment, probably didn’t actually happen. You can have happy endings, but only if through most of the story they seemed unlikely to occur. So White’s chops are a matter of gloom and depression, dreary lives; ugly food, ugly people. The reheated pizza belongs to a society of young people who don’t cook, can’t cook, won’t cook, who know nothing of food and care nothing for it, and it is a powerful image of lives that are disorderly, lacking in meaningful or comforting rituals.


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It’s interesting that the food of crime writing and thriller genres is junk food. These are narratives of stress, hurry, deprivation, and the junk food, with its sugary fattiness that fills and bloats but does not finally satisfy, in fact may disgust, is also addictive. Sue Grafton’s detective heroine (in her alphabetical crime series) comes into this category, though she has friends who occasionally cook her real food, but when the going gets tough she’s out there into the bottom-of-the-foodchain takeaways. The exception in this genre is the quite considerable number of crime stories that involve chefs and eating as detective and plot. Apparently it’s a whole sub-genre of its own. Lilian in Grenville’s novel of her story stuffs herself because she’s unhappy, her father, apart from raping her, is verbally abusive. He bullies her so she eats everything she can find to console herself and becomes fat and so she believes ugly and repulsive. Whereas her brother rebels, and becomes a vegetarian in order to eat noisy food like carrots and celery, instead of soft heavy roast meat and vegetables. He sits at the table crunching away and it is marvellously irritating for the father. Food is also a wonderful image of the breaking of taboos. The liver in Portnoy’s Complaint is washed because the hero masturbated in it. Then he cleaned it up and put it back into the fridge and his mother cooked it for dinner. Hardly kosher. A good revenge on the suffocating Jewish mother. The children in a pie, cut up, cooked and served to their mother is another act of revenge, a very good one you’d have to say. Such tender little morsels, baked in a pastry case, which used to be called a coffin in Shakespeare’s day. When I was writing for Epicurean I called one article ‘Coffins for Christmas’ which I thought had a good ring to it; it was about a variety of pies including a marvellous raised pie that you could make for Christmas celebrations. But the sub-editor spoilt it by putting ‘Pastry’ in front of ‘coffins’ so there was no frisson. And of course in Titus Andronicus there is another taboo involved: cannibalism.


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Food can tell you a lot about character. Falstaff’s pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack creates him very neatly as a drunkard. Bungaree trout is a depression dish, when you cook potatoes in batter and pretend you are eating fish. (What are you doing when you eat the contemporary potato scallop, which is the same thing, and as stodgy a dish as ever gave anyone indigestion? You can’t imagine yourself to be eating a delicate little shellfish.) But Illywhacker feasts on his Bungaree trout—Bungaree is where the potatoes come from—with a certain cockiness, a certain spirit. Things may be bad but you aren’t going to let them get you down. Fortunately, food in novels doesn’t have to be grim. Proust’s madeleine, the plain little cake dipped into lime tea, opens the path to memory and so the whole amazing work. For the moment lost time is found in the taste of that little tidbit of cake. Virginia Woolf’s daube, in its long careful simmering, is an image of love, of the melding of everything together, in itself, its own ingredients, and in the way it brings people together round the dinner table, despite tensions, despite differences. It is an emblem of the effort of will of Mrs Ramsay, the hostess, to make people happy. And of course this is likely to be as ephemeral as the dish. Though the memory of it will remain; as the dish is recalled, so is the companionship of the moment, and both are preserved and recreated in Woolf’s words. Bloom’s kidney, which he cooks for himself before his day walking about Dublin, is a source of great pleasure to him, and a reminder of the edginess of food. It tells us that the line between disgust and desire is a fine one, and not the same for everybody. I enjoy andouillettes, hot tripe sausages, in the same way. Grass’s Flounder as well as being delicious is loaded with meanings. It is an immemorial fish, a fish that has nourished a civilisation, and has been an emblem of love between individuals. And it is also the magic granter of wishes. Finally, my salmon wrapped in paper: it is an elegant and delicate


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meal quickly shopped for and cooked by a working woman who has more money than time, and it is a symbol for her of the life she will have to give up if she loses her job by going off to Paris to try to find her lover. It is shop luck, the food of someone with the money to buy simple superb food that needs little effort, rather than pot luck. I was talking about this on a food and literature panel at a Melbourne Festival, along with Stephanie Alexander. She remarked that she had had an interesting experience along these lines that very week, when she talked on the radio about simple good food for busy working people that would not be too expensive. She suggested a simple dish of salmon, I think hers might have been grilled, with boiled small potatoes and a salad. The program was a kind of culinary talkback, and a woman called to say that yes, she often did nice salmon dishes, like salmon mornay, and had a good tip; you could use tinned pink salmon and add a bit of cochineal so that people thought it was red salmon and the whole appeared much more elegant and expensive than it really was. What’s more, this response was typical of the callers to the program. Stephanie told this story ruefully; I think she was slightly chastened to realise how she had misjudged at least part of her audience, on grounds of class, indeed, and money, and sophistication. What for her was easy and simple and not overly expensive (compared with takeaway food, which she was suggesting people could avoid with this sort of plain cooking) was not even a concept to some of her listeners. They simply assumed salmon came out of a tin. Of course it was morning radio, and those of her audience who might have benefited from the advice were probably out at work, earning the money to buy simple good food. But the story is a perfect example of how people are placed by food. It may turn up in one of my novels one day. Literature is full of meals. And you could not take any one of them out without wrecking what’s left behind. Fiction will always desire the moment made concrete that food offers.


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Famine and feast, fat, flesh and fast

If we are going to think about food and the consumption of it a good place to start is by considering its absence, which is a state and a drastic one, namely hunger, which may turn into starvation. This can be involuntary, and it may be willed. Most of us have experience of the latter kind, through diets, or through fasting for religious reasons, like Lent, or Ramadan, or social ones, as in a Forty Hour Famine, but very few people reading these words will have had experience of real starvation. We use the words: I’m so hungry, I’m starving, but they aren’t true, most of us are speaking metaphorically. In fact we live in a society where most of us can eat as much as we want, a society which is endangered by eating too much rather than too little. Too many of us, including our children, are obese. Not that we should simple-mindedly blame our own greed for that. The rapaciousness of multi-nationals is a factor, secretly increasing the fat levels of the junk foods they persuade us to buy, telling us truthfully enough that they contain no cholesterol when the significant thing is not what they contain but what they induce. Our genes are important; for instance, descendants of survivors of the holocaust often easily run to fat because their bodies can do a lot with a small


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amount of food, that is how their parents or grandparents were able to live through such privation, whereas the envied thin who are able to eat hugely and not get fat don’t do well in circumstances of starvation. And there’s another kind of ancestry, the working poor who toiled away their lives on bare bone soup and old bread; feed their offspring generously and their flesh will bloom. Nor should we forget history, which tells us that food might not always be a given. Our intellects know we don’t need it at this moment but atavistically we are not sure we can depend on its always being there. We feast because we fear the famine that some race memory tells us may come. Some societies have had metabolisms adapted to such a mode of eating; certain Aboriginal people could build up reserves of body fat in periods of plenty, for instance at the time of the great migrations of the Bogong moths (like the herring runs of northern Europe), they feasted on the moths while they were available— roasting them, making moth cakes out of them—and survived on this fat in lean months. But if lean periods don’t come we just get fatter. Some people will be old enough to remember parents telling us that our eating, or refusing to do so, was somehow connected with others starving, expressed in the words Eat up your broccoli, or spinach, or

custard, think of the starving children of India, or Africa, how glad they’d be to have what you’re rejecting. Even as children we could see the illogic of this; we knew that our finishing this disgusting stuff on our plates wasn’t going to make the slightest difference to unhappy children half a world away. We resolved we wouldn’t use such arguments with our own offspring, and I think the admonition has pretty well died out. Yet morally there’s a lot of truth in it. Our parents were saying, You live in a state of plenty, respect it by not wasting it. We could mutter, Put it in a box and post it to them, then, I don’t want it, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the obscenity of throwing away good food. An earlier generation still would have said Wilful waste brings woeful want,


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and told stories like Hogarth engravings of the sudden downfalls that would result. As though want would take the form of a moderately instant karmic punishment for waste. I can hear my grandmother saying this. She still had a distinctive Lancashire accent, at least in some words, like salt, though she had been born in Australia. She was a slender old lady who lived to the middle of her nineties and had a good death, as people said. She was going along perfectly healthy and one morning said, I don’t think I’ll get out of bed today, and shortly after died. She’d lived well, too. My grandfather grew great crops of vegetables, and she preserved what they didn’t need to eat. I remember Sunday night teas at their place, with marvellous arrays of salads and cold meat and a number of hearty cakes and slices. They didn’t go in for sponges, the women in my family: too frivolous. When grandfather died these teas continued, but the family brought plates. Granma did wonderful onion, sweet and mild, dressed with light vinegar, and was famous for her salad dressings, which used oil, and were considered rather arcane, so much so that I haven’t the faintest idea how they were made, how the eggs (from her own chooks, of course) and oil got together, though I think they were cooked somehow; maybe they were a kind of hollandaise sauce? Plenty and thrift, they were the deal. Wilful waste brings woeful want. Respect the hungry by paying attention to your own food. In fact, had there been some miraculous means of putting that food we didn’t want to eat in a box and posting it to starving children it’s likely they wouldn’t have wanted it. I’ve got a book called Loaves and Wishes, an anthology of pieces about food by writers like Margaret Drabble, Maeve Binchy, Margaret Atwood, Robyn Archer, Doris Lessing, published by Virago for Oxfam’s fiftieth birthday. Germaine Greer writes about famine. She points out that starving people won’t eat just anything, they are not hungry, they have no appetite at all, they need to be


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seduced by familiar foods, the foods of their culture. Give them strange and unappetising food, however nourishing, and they will die with uneaten portions of it in their possession. She describes the hard and leathery unsalted pancakes found in the carrying cloths of Ethiopians who had died of hunger. They weren’t their kind of food, their wasted stomachs could not contemplate eating such foreign stuff. Hunger is the best sauce, we are told, but only before it has become starvation. Hungry is what the survivors of the crash of the Andean plane full of footballers were, and they still had enough energy to carve pieces from their dead companions and eat them, raw, or rotting; putrid intestines provided the salty flavours they were craving. But had they been not hungry, but starving, they would not have had the courage, the heart, to eat the flesh of their teammates. Courage, heart: they are at some point the same word, one from Latin, cor, the other from Old English. Once people believed that eating emblematically could have physical results, that ingesting the heart of a noble beast would improve one’s courage. The brain one’s intelligence. The penis one’s sexual prowess. Tiger penises are still in demand which endangers not just the lives of their individual owners but the whole species, so the belief hasn’t died out. We think we’re more clever than this, that we look at the intrinsic rather than symbolic qualities of our food, its nutrients, its vitamins, what it does with free radicals, the incidence of good fats–bad fats. But in fact medical and nutritional experts contradict themselves every other week. If only it were as simple as the cowboy movies, when it was all a matter of hats, the goodies in white ones, the baddies in black. Fats in hats. You could make a television series out of it. Could be bigger than Bananas in Pyjamas. If I were to promise you a better life in the future as a result of some little self-denial in the present, if I were to say that renouncing your sins would bring rewards, possibly even that miracles might occur, you


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would probably imagine me speaking of the Christian religion. But it’s much more likely I’d be promoting my new diet book. Renounce the sins of the foods—fat, or carbohydrate, meat or protein, depending on which cult I am promoting—obey my not-too-strict rules, and the Heaven of slim hips and thighs, a slender waist and a flat tummy will be yours. I think I’d rather read Brillat-Savarin, who reckons people are born to be fat, amongst other things, and their physiognomy reveals it. Most people who die of consumption have brown hair, long faces and pointed noses. Most obese people have short faces, round eyes, and snub noses. We might as well look in the mirror and give in to our fate. Nutritionists speak as though eating the right kind of food is a science but their vocabulary suggests it’s more a matter of morality. Eat well and you’ll be rewarded with good health. Consume fats and be consigned to the hell of disease. Your heart will buckle. And hardly anybody has the courage to say, is it really as simple as all that? Except occasionally centenarians who tell us they have eaten three slices of bacon on bread fried in butter every day for breakfast for the last ninety-seven years and look where it has got them. The fact is there are no guaranteeable recipes but just hopes built on the speculation of the moment. Our descendants will look back on this era of healthy food fads and think them as curious as any other kind of fashion. For food has a lot to do with fashion. Sometimes we can see the connection, when it’s made too obvious to miss. When for instance fashion equals fashion magazines and the models all have the bodies of hyperactive eight-year-olds. Is it a historical first, that young women should be led to starve themselves to achieve a curious notion of beauty? Of course suffering has often been involved: there was footbinding in China, but it’s not certain that the victims were ever very willing; obedient, perhaps, but not keen. (I only recently discovered that the fragrant whiff of decaying flesh was considered erotic.) There


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was tight-lacing in nineteenth-century Europe and America, where young women not naturally endowed with narrow waists were determined to create them, and sometimes did themselves terrible damage, twisting their spines and compressing their internal organs, so if they did manage to get pregnant death in childbirth was the more likely. On occasions they drank vinegar to make their waists slender and are supposed to have killed themselves with it, though I am not sure how much this is a cautionary tale. But anorexia, willed starvation, which may take tremendous heart and courage, however wrong-headed, is another matter. It’s not simply slenderness that is desired, it is flesh that is feared, so that even extreme skinniness is viewed as disgusting fat; the anorexic is unable any longer to see herself as she is. It’s as though a splinter of Hans Andersen’s wicked mirror has lodged itself in her eye. Remember the story? An evil magician makes a mirror which turns hideous everything it reflects, and breaking it doesn’t get rid of its wickedness, just turns it into a myriad fragments which embed themselves in eyes and hearts and so distort the world that everything seems ugly and evil. Thus, an anorexic may be quite skinny, but sees herself in this false way as ugly, gross, obese. She starves herself. She (it mostly is she but not always) becomes ‘weak and feeble ... her hair is all unkempt, her eyes hollow and deeply sunken, her face pale, with dry lips ... [you] could see her entrails beneath her hard skin. From her flanks ... her bones protrude, and she seems to have no stomach but only the place where it should be, so deeply hollowed out that the girl’s breasts hang from her backbone.’ What is quite tragic is that an anorexic would look at this ghastly reflection in the mirror and think too fat. But I have to confess I’ve cheated with this quotation. It’s not contemporary. The writer of these words didn’t have in mind a young woman seeking beauty but a cruel and malicious creature called Hunger, an allegorical figure in that


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great thirteenth-century work, Le Roman de la Rose, and a monster to be avoided at all costs. Everyone knew that if you fell into the clutches of Hunger you were doomed. Indeed some flesh on the bones has mostly been valued by society. It was a sign of prosperity. It was the poor whose bones stuck out, and nobody wanted to look like them. Now the more overt the skeleton the better the designer clothes hang. It’s all in the name of fashion, but fashion is more than gratuitous invention, it is an expression of a society’s values. Which is a fearful thought. It was the 1920s which saw quite drastic changes in admired body images. Up till then the desirable figure for men and women (I speak of course only of Caucasians) was white and plump. Plump because well fed, white because it was a sign that you led a sheltered life and didn’t have to work in the burning sun. But in the twenties the focus shifted, the look to have was thin and brown. Thin because you ate good delicate expensive high-protein food, not the cheap heavy calorific stodge of toiling menials, and brown because that was a sign that you didn’t work but could follow the sun and lie about at your leisure tanning yourself; being brown in other people’s winters said I am a person who lives in eternal summer. One of the great advocates of this kind of thinness, in the form of a whippy leanness, was Marinetti, the Italian Futurist poet for whom food was more about its emblematic qualities than flavour. Colour, texture, pattern, all mattered more than taste, and had meanings that were political and sexual rather than culinary. He was a Modernist and liked speed and technology and thought that the people who understood all these things best were Mussolini’s Fascists; he was keen that they should legislate against Italians eating pasta because it made them fat and sluggish. It was not food for heroes and the country was going to need plenty of those in the noble battles to come. Really he’d have liked to dispense with food altogether, for the vast mass of people, and


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have them nourish themselves with pills. Naturally his ideas didn’t catch on since Italians know as well as anybody in the world that one of the greatest pleasures in life, especially a life of hard work and little fun, is eating, is making a feast out of the basic business of nourishment, however simple, and not even the Fascists could stop them eating pasta. Apparently Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time, either; that’s a myth, pure and successful propaganda. We’ve never quite lost the notion that thin and brown is beautiful, even though we now know that tanning is dangerous. But we have stopped caring about looking healthy. The waifs of grunge, the heroin chic of bluish bruised skin and hollow eyes: fashion models with their subverted children’s bodies are fetishing an unhealthiness that flirts with death. Anorexia, bulimia, drugs, or the possession of a deficient metabolism are the only way to look like this. What is curious is that we should admire models of famine and disease. The medieval authors of Le Roman de la Rose would have been mystified. Moreover, we are supposed to pursue unnatural thinness into old age. Once it was accepted that women eating less food at fifty than at twenty would put on weight, and that was all right, because grandmas are supposed to be plump, they don’t have to run round after small energetic children, not most of the time, they ought to be comfortable and cuddly, with laps and large bosoms and baggy faces that they have lived in for half a century and wrinkles that come from seeing the funny side of all that and sometimes crying about it and sometimes yelling with anger. And the little pads of fat that say we have eaten many feasts and in celebrating the goodness of life have made it so. When you look at a skull, a real one, the fleshless bone, it has a message for people who are alive, especially but not only the young and fresh-faced. It says: As you are, so I was. As I am, so you will be. A memento mori, so that we live our lives knowing that we are going to die. It’s also a form of words for the middle-aged and elderly. Their plump bodies


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and baggy faces say just that: As you are, so I was. As I am, so you will be. Less frightening coming from a living face, not a skull. A way of recognising that the no-longer young have been there, done that, and are moving on. Thinness equals youth equals pleasure is not an equation that makes sense of life. I find it interesting that botox, a deadly food poison, is injected into faces to get rid of wrinkles. It mostly gets rid of expression too but people seem weirdly happy with that trade-off. I read in a magazine that certain actors have problems showing emotion out of their paralysed faces; it’s the wrinkles that express love and fear and joy. Botulism in food is a horrible thing and will make you very ill if not kill you. But it is okay to inject it into your face, around your eyes, near your brain. People pronounce it bow (to rhyme with go) tox but I insist on saying it as in botulism, bottox. You can’t fudge the connection by changing the pronunciation.

* The world’s two greatest cuisines come from peasant economies, not out of poverty, but out of thriftiness. Out of working hard to produce food and in the knowledge that you will be hungry if you fail. Times of plenty must involve a putting away for times of scarcity, and nothing must be wasted. The seasons have their imperatives. I speak of the French and the Chinese. Both complicated and subtle and based on thrift, on not wasting even the most unprepossessing potential edibles. Both doing miraculous things with pigs, and of both it has been said that they use everything but the squeal. Ears, trotters, blood, intestines. The large difference between the two is in their use of heat: the French had plenty of long slow heat available, the Chinese had to make the most of quick short bursts, which is why everything is prepared meticulously beforehand. Of course I am generalising. And out of these careful daily practices, based on respect for food because you


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knew in the marrow of your aching bones what effort had gone into producing it, what a miracle was your wresting it from unfriendly soils and climates, out of this respect grew great cuisines which may be extravagant but are not wasteful. Which are works of art flowering out of a deep knowledge of raw materials, their messiness, their danger, their possible nastiness. One of my favourite dishes is andouillette, tripe sausage. I love it because in its rubbery texture and—possibly?—urinaceous odour it comes close to being disgusting; the more narrowly it misses the more exceptionally delicious it is. I eat chicken feet and tripe in yum cha for the same reason. And because their idea of thrift delights me. Thrift isn’t a word you hear much these days. I don’t know that you heard it much when I was growing up but thrifty my family certainly was. Not that we were peasants, Australia’s misfortune is that we never had any, being a colony of the industrial revolution, but we were not very rich and of necessity had to be careful. We didn’t waste things. We cleaned up our plates. The starving children wouldn’t have done well out of our leavings. And there were treats of a culinary kind, to be looked forward to. A roast on Sunday, mostly lamb, occasionally beef but that a rolled roast and I remember my mother’s doubtful face as she cut into it, worrying about its being tough, fatty, evidence of a tricky butcher hiding bad meat inside a fair covering. Chooks at Christmas and Easter, wonderful enormous fresh-killed birds (our own, or from a man called Mr Kitchen—truly—who lived in the next street) thoroughly stuffed with savoury bread and onions and herbs, such magnificent beasts that they fed a family of five once as a hot dish and several times more cold. Most meals were plain, chops, veal, fried fish, with potatoes and carrots, peas, beans, not bad food but not exciting, which made the grand occasions more so, the steak and kidney pudding with its juicy suet crust, the crumbed veal with tomato and onion gravy (sauce espagnole


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was its fancy name), the occasional sweet puddings, lemon meringue pies, cakes at weekends. There was an order, a hierarchy, that made the special dishes appreciated. I think we’ve lost this. Those of us who eat well eat too well all the time. The private rituals, family and social, that gave power to food and were in turn given point by scarcity, are generally lost. Once you could offer birthday persons their favourite treat for dinner and be sure they would know what would give them pleasure; now they have trouble choosing amongst an embarrassment of riches, or else ate it for dinner last night anyway. Unless it’s a child who demands McDonald’s. I talked to a six-year-old of my acquaintance who had been to one of those birthday parties that McDonald’s so cleverly organise for the busy mothers of small children. What did you have to eat, I asked. She gave me a superior rather pitying stare. McDonald’s, she said, in a pained voice. So now it is the name of the food as well. I don’t know what we can do about the problem of eating too well. We can’t create situations of scarcity in order to make ourselves grateful. Apart from being too busy, we wouldn’t want to. I actually like eating well (not necessarily extravagantly or complicatedly or expensively or time-consumingly, but with respect and preferably with thrift) all the time. I don’t want to give it up. But it does make treats difficult to arrange. Religion has always played an important role here. Religious fasts are a way of making you enjoy going back to normal eating, they demand an asceticism that restores the jaded palate’s faith. And religious ceremonies require special foods which ought to be associated only with that time. So we have hot cross buns at Easter, pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, before the forty days’ fasting of Lent. The French are specially good at punctuating the year with culinary celebrations.


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Around the time of Twelfth Night, January 5, the bakeries are full of galettes des rois. Twelfth Night is the eve of Epiphany, the feast of the Kings, the wise men who brought presents for the Christ Child, when his divinity was revealed, and on to it has been attached a pagan festival with its origins in the much lengthier Roman Saturnalia. So it’s also an occasion for behaving badly, it’s the feast of the Lord of Misrule, when the normal order of things is thrown out and the servants are masters for the night. The theory is that a night of misbehaviour makes you good for the rest of the year. I’m not sure that the Fête des rois involves much naughtiness any more, but there are rituals. There is a small favour in the cake, a bean, a fève, and the person who gets it is king for the night, he gets to wear a crown of gilt paper, which the bakery gives you when you buy the cake, and to choose a queen, and you have to do what he says. Or the bean chooses a queen, who chooses a king. In Australia, you have to make your own cake. In France there are little china charms, a doll, a crown, usually of plain white china but I once got a little Scotsman in a kilt, painted pink and green. But a bean will do.

Galette des rois | There are two kinds, one rich, one lean. The lean one is simply delicious puff pastry, the rich one has a filling, usually of almond paste. This plain one is from Edouard de Pomiane, who broadcast on French radio in the thirties. I found two volumes of this Radio Cuisine in a small bookshop in the rue Dauphine; Paris is full of cellars where amazing discoveries can be made. These had turned up, having been forgotten for forty years, their pages still uncut. The recipes are chatty, easy, friendly, and the books are prized possessions. Mix 150 grams of butter into 300 grams of flour with a pinch of salt and a little water. I use a food processor, very gingerly. They must be not quite mixed. Form into a ball.


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That’s the ingredients got together. The process is a bit longer. Wrap it in a cloth and wait for an hour. Sprinkle flour on work space. Roll out a disc as big as a big plate. Fold in three like a napkin, then in three the other way, perpendicular to this (that is, a quarter turn in puff pastry parlance). Cover with a cloth, wait fifteen minutes. Repeat this process of folding and waiting. Roll out again in a disc 8 millimetres thick. Cut into a circle with a tart mould. Introduce the bean and place on a buttered baking sheet. Make a diamond pattern in the top with a knife, and prick it in ten places. Cook in a very hot oven for ten minutes, check, cook another ten. Your galette should be ‘marvellous, golden, lightly humped, crackled’. And of a delicious simplicity. (My eyes happen to glance at the next page of Radio Cuisine: Pomiane has la grippe—influenza. He’s bought a packet of aspirin and a bottle of eau de vie. Six days later, the aspirins are unopened, the bottle is pretty well gone and he’s cured. He has he tells us a blind faith in alcohol as a medicine, and goes on to give examples of how and why.) The only problem these days is that the cakes for the feast of the kings no longer come and go speedily; they are available for weeks before and weeks after, which rather wrecks the specialness of the festival. The English tradition is plum pudding for Christmas, with threepences and sixpences, spoiled by decimal currency which apparently doesn’t cook well and by the fact that here in the antipodes we don’t think it proper for the climate. We are encouraged to give up our roast turkeys and eat prawns and oysters and whole poached salmon instead. I go along with that, religious festivals were always influenced by seasons and traditions are for adapting, but I insist on pudding.


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(The best thing is to make two, and keep one for the middle of winter.) Once Catholics weren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays, but that’s okay now, though I confess that in my Protestant affection for ritual I choose not to eat meat on Good Friday; I need at least one occasion for abstinence in the year. Not that it works, I just eat some good fish instead which is no hardship at all. But such religious observances remain long after the faith that created them has faded. Which says something about their atavistic nature. Like Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s play is subtitled What You Will) most of them were hijackings of pagan ceremonies anyway, like the midwinter feasting that celebrates the passing of the year’s shortest day, or longest night; by 25 December you are ready to believe that one day another spring will come. And in the right hemisphere, the accompanying feast is seasonal. So you have young lamb at the spring festival of Easter, or Passover; turkey, goose and rich warming foods at Christmas; and so on. And then there is forbidden food. Some religions have had strict dietary laws: Muslims not eating pork, vegetarian Hindus, Jewish kosher rules. Maybe the original taboos came from danger, maybe they originated in hygiene, now they are an element in rituals which nourish people’s lives. Traditional meals become affirmations. A group of Jewish people celebrating Passover may not believe all the tenets of the Jewish faith, may have no strong religious convictions but be acting out of a sense of race (if it’s possible to use that word in a non-pejorative sense any more), of history and family; the rituals will be less about God than human connection. Christmas is an important festival for lapsed, ex, never-were Christians; you can criticise it as a cynical commercial exercise, but its absence would be a loss because a society needs things to do together. Something would have to be invented, and it would end up like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, St Valentine’s, thoroughly market driven.


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What saves us from a simply animal or basely commercial consumption is paying attention. All of humanity’s important occasions are marked by feasting: weddings, deaths, birthdays, christenings, anniversaries. Food eaten in festivity says we are glad to be alive. Our daily fare nourishes not just our bodies, but our minds. If we do not eat it we will die, but if we do not think about the eating of it we will be only half alive. Some food for feasting:

L a m b w i t h b é a r n a i s e s a u c e | When my son James was quite small I let him choose what he wanted for his birthday dinner. This is what he asked for, and I still make it out of that memory. Make incisions with a sharp knife in a leg of lamb and stuff in thick slices of garlic. I like to spit-roast mine, fairly rare, about forty minutes per kilo, and let it rest for ten minutes in a warm place before carving. You make a béarnaise sauce, using mint in the basic reduction of herbs, and remembering Pomiane’s injunction to make it out of a pot of boiling water, that is, keep lifting it away from the heat, that way it won’t curdle. Rare lamb with this unctuous sauce is wonderfully rich, and best served with a simple vegetable, a pile of crisp green baby beans, for instance. I am sufficiently my mother’s daughter to believe we have to have a cake for Christmas, so occasional callers can be offered a piece. If I were my mother in her palmy days I would have three, one a little less rich than the others, made ahead and wrapped in layers of greaseproof and brown paper, tied with string, then folded in tea cloths. This one doesn’t need to be made early, it is apart from the fruit very light. It is a version of those that you can buy as a set of ingredients from health food stores, but I like to do my own choosing.


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Fruit cake 4 eggs 1 cup sugar 1⁄ 4 cup white wine

1 cup plain flour 1 teaspoon baking powder pinch salt

1 cup chopped glace pineapple 400 grams whole dates 225 grams glace cherries 225 grams walnut halves

225 grams whole almonds 225 grams whole brazil nuts 50 grams preserved ginger

Separate eggs; beat yolks, add sugar and beat together thoroughly. Add wine, mix well. Add flour sifted with baking powder and salt. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Mix fruit and nuts well, add to batter. Pour into greased and lined tin (23 cms square). Bake in slow oven 11⁄ 2–13⁄ 4 hours or until cooked. Cool thoroughly. Store in airtight container. The secret to keeping it is to anoint it with brandy from time to time.

A w h o l e s a l m o n p o a c h e d | This is good for antipodean Christmasses. Buy a whole salmon, or a salmon trout, put it in a fish kettle with a handful of herbs like parsley and dill, some white wine, a tablespoon of wine vinegar, an onion and two cloves of garlic chopped. Cover with cold water. Bring slowly to the boil and when it has bubbled strongly a couple of times turn it off and leave it to cool and cook in the liquid (which can be boiled down for fish soup). Serve on a large platter with a mayonnaise flavoured with dill. You can also use a little garlic, but not too much, not as strong as an aioli. Some small hot boiled potatoes are good with this. And a cucumber salad. This method of cooking leaves the fish very moist and juicy and of a lovely simple flavour. It will serve a number of people—perhaps a dozen if it is a good-sized fish.

*


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Whenever people came to our house my father would say, You see, I married a good cook. With a faint expansive gesture indicating the tea table. This was always a given in our house, that our mother was a good cook, and certainly not the case, we knew, in many households. The definition of good cooking was baking. When I think of it, it was entirely to do with the oven. It was wonderful cakes and pastries, slices, cookies, biscuits, tarts. It extended as far as the roast, with superb crusty vegetables. It didn’t really mean the daily meat and vegetables. My mother like most of her contemporaries had a horror of blood, so meat like chops or steak tended to be cooked to death. For years I didn’t care for liver, believing it be rubbery in taste and texture. Brains she did well, though, mashing them with pepper and parsley and frying them in little patties, served with lemon juice. And she did a terrific veal escalope, with a sauce espagnole, otherwise known as a tomato and onion gravy, which was impressively continental. Boiled vegetables were overcooked and plain. Mashed potato was good, but never very buttery. But it was the sweet things she excelled at, and possibly that was because these were my father’s favourite. He didn’t drink at all, no wine with meals, and I think the drinking of wine cultivates a taste for savoury things. For him these were a nourishing necessity, if not quite a chore, to be got through before the real treat. There would be a baking day at least once a week, because once you’d heated the oven it was wasteful not to use it for a number of things, and anyway a good housewife did not offer shop biscuits or cakes, she had her tins full in case somebody called and needed to be given a cup of tea. Not the frivolous sponge cakes, too extravagant of eggs for one thing, but worse, tasteless and not good at keeping. She much preferred a butter cake, or a light fruit cake, or various slices, date, or raspberry shortbread. Christmas puddings were marvellous, I have never eaten a pudding so good as hers, so rich, so dark, so moist. She didn’t boil them in a cloth,


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like granma, she steamed them in a basin. If you asked her for the recipe she could be vague, she couldn’t quite remember which one, or whether she’d followed it carefully, and I soon realised that she wasn’t being tricky, she was always using some new recipe that she found in the Women’s Weekly or the daily paper, but it was the fact of her making it that made it so good. No matter what recipe, it was Milly’s pudding, so it wasn’t necessarily useful to copy out what she thought she’d done. When I was a small child people used to come to the house to sing. They’d catch the tram and bring their music, my father would play the piano and they’d all stand round it and sing their heads off. Then they’d have supper, cups of tea with a great spread of cakes, biscuits, slices, and probably some cucumber, or maybe mock chicken, sandwiches. I remember when I was at university we had a meeting of the Recorded Music Society at my house, my parents’ house, which was a curious replica of this: the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the tiny cloth napkins, the same food. Whereas of course it should have been a smoky dingy room with lots of black coffee and cigarettes and no food and conversations about philosophy in the gaps between records. Fifties beatnik, in fact. I knew this, and watched helplessly as it turned into an elegant ladies’ supper. There are certain things my mother taught me. How to fold flour into beaten butter and sugar. How to deal with egg whites—her lemon meringue pie was a marvel. How to make pastry, the necessity of a light hand. This light hand is quite a curious thing. For years now I have made pastry in a food processor. I’m good at it, my pastry is excellent. I tried to teach somebody once, a woman I worked with; I told her how to do it but she never could, she reckoned hers was always heavy. So now I think that by some atavistic means this light touch has to transfer itself through even the apparently intransigent means of the machine. This is real mother’s-knee stuff. Except it was standing in the kitchen, and her saying no, not like that, like this, and showing me, and my doing it and her correcting, until I got it right. I have cooked


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far fancier and more complicated things than my mother ever did, but I am grateful for these basic elements of tuition. I don’t quite see that you can ever teach yourself these things from books. Certainly not from television. My middle sister hated stew but she liked casseroles, so my mother became very good at them, they were just the thing for a thrifty household, and though you may think this was a bit tricky the difference between a casserole and a stew is the extra flavours of vegetables and herbs and even slurps of wine, bought in flagons from the vineyards of the Hunter Valley and kept in the cupboard for cooking only, though we did make claret cup for parties. On my twenty-first birthday my erstwhile teachers from the English Department at Newcastle University came to visit me and I gave them a glass—how vinegary it must have been, kept in a part empty flagon for however many weeks. This recipe has some of the character of a casserole but it also brings in my mother’s cleverness with pastry. My copy is typed on the portable but large and heavy Alpina I bought when I went to university, to my mother’s dictation, with comments in her handwriting.

S t e a k a n d k i d n ey p u d d i n g

Hot water pastry: 3 cups self-raising flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg yolk Filling: 21⁄ 2 lbs (1.25 kilos) chuck steak 8 oz (250 grams) kidney (lamb) 2 tablespoons flour salt, pepper 1 large onion

5 oz (155 grams) lard 2⁄3 cup water

4 oz (125 grams) mushrooms 1⁄2 cup red wine 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce sprigs thyme


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Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in centre, add egg yolk, cover with some of the flour, stir. Place lard and water into a pan, stand over a low heat until lard melts. Bring to boil. Add boiling water mixture all at once to flour, stir until combined. Water must be boiling, otherwise the pastry will be difficult to mould and may crack during cooking. Allow to cool slightly, turn out on to lightly floured surface, knead until smooth. Cover, leave to stand for 30 minutes, knead again for 1 minute. Roll out 2⁄3 of pastry, line a well-greased 4 pint (2 litre) pudding basin. Remove fat and gristle from meat, cut into 1 inch (2.5 cm) cubes. Cut kidney into cubes, put into a bowl of cold salted water for 30 minutes. Drain. Toss meat and kidney in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Mix in onion and mushrooms sliced and thyme leaves. Pack into pastry-lined pudding basin, add wine and Worcestershire sauce. Roll out remaining pastry to form lid. Wet edges of pastry and press firmly together. Cover with greased aluminium foil, then with lid of basin, or make a cover of a teatowel held in place with string and the edges knotted over the top. Steam covered for 6 hours—or 4 hours, then another 2 before serving. Let stand 15 minutes then turn out carefully—or if nervous serve straight from basin. It is important to watch the water level in the saucepan while it is cooking. Replace with boiling water when necessary, about every 30 minutes. I love these old English classic recipes. I like Mediterranean food too, and French, and Thai, but there is a heritage here I don’t think we should forget. This is hearty cold-weather food, for energetic people, and perfect in such circumstances.


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Passages of time

9 J u ly 2 0 0 3 Sometimes July is the cruellest month, in Canberra anyway. So bleak, and dark so early. I love winter, but it is rather gloomy knowing that summer is so far away. I know it’s past the solstice so the days are supposed to be lengthening, but I am not sure the days are aware of this. You could be wondering if this fact that Christmas in the north celebrates, the perceptible extra minutes of daylight, the promise that the threat of universal night has once again passed, has in fact not happened, and we are plunging towards ever longer darkness. Fortunately the garden is curiously unaware of this. It is burgeoning. It’s an odd fact, that in the summer my garden is quite dull, it’s just green, though this is charming. But somehow just a cool backdrop, pleasing to the eye, with no particular beauties to catch the attention. I keep trying to find something that will be special in summer, but I suppose it is all too shady. But then I remember that the gamut of greens is beautiful. Of course there is the autumn colour with its painted stillness—once in a novel I said it was as though the world was freeze-framed on a video recorder, fixed in a still moment but trembling a little as videos did—and then the leaves in their gazillions to be dealt with. I went out this morning and my nicely swept terraces of yesterday are all littered with leaves.


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But the beds are full of pricking bulbs, hard little green shafts of leaves and little bursts of bud on some of them. Lucy gave me a woven metal goose for Christmas and for a while she sat on the lawn but then when it needed to be mowed I put her in the garden, beside two beautiful chalky balls in dark blue colours, one a little larger than a tennis ball and the other bigger still, a Christmas present from Brenda. (People give me things for the garden as presents; Lucy counted twenty-six objects the other day, including the stone lion from James, to guard the entrance to Graham’s garden; I love them all.) The goose regards the balls with a certain bemusement. The goose that laid the cerulean eggs. And now I see that some bulbs are coming up through her, about to burst into creamy flowers; I think they might be paperwhite daffodils. I am bad at keeping proper records. I have got some little plastic tags but I don’t always use them. And my intention of writing them down in a notebook with diagrams remains just that, an intention. But I know where the Queen of the Night tulips were last year, and I can see the sharp little spears of their leaves in a drift across the bed. They were so beautiful in their blackly crimson colour that I went and got my neighbours to come and admire them, and every time anybody visited they had to go out and look, for the problem is the garden is too cold to do much loitering around, you need a conscious trip to admire it. And I planted some more Queens of the Night, I love to have a lot of one kind of flower. I bought some miniature daffodils called minnow, and they are coming up in their terracotta pots on the front terrace. All these bulbs pushing up, they always make me think of Dylan Thomas and his poem, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, though when you look it up it is a poem about death, about the whole strength and thrust of life leading to destruction and decay, but every year the bulbs come and though one might want to slow them down and say not another spring, not yet, it is better not to count the years passing and worry that there can’t be many left but just to marvel.


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The bulbs are still mainly promise but the hellebores are blooming, the white ones with faint maroon speckles, the various greenish ones, the myriad looping bell shapes called foetida though they smell quite okay to me, the dark burgundy-coloured, the purplish pink. I have a lot of hellebores because they are so happy in my garden, and they sow themselves about. These seedlings are supposed to take a number of years to flower but mine don’t seem that slow. It is good to get the rare ones but the self-sown will probably be the usual greeny-white—the common or garden variety one might say. The sasanqua camellias are nearly finished. One is pale pink, and one day about two years ago my son stopped and smelt it; I was about to say Camellias don’t smell, silly, but he opened his eyes wide and said, that’s lovely, and so it is, a faint almond smell, delicate yet potent, and I have had that tree about thirty years probably and didn’t know it was fragrant because I had never expected it to be. Since then I have sought out some of the tiny-flowered scented varieties, which are often creamy white flushed with cherry pink. I bought three last year and two died, I think they did not like the soil near the new wall. I shall try again this year. I am fond of innocent simple flowers, like the sasanquas, and the hellebores, and the medlar blossoms. But then the old camellias in various shades of pink and red and loosely or tightly rosetted are beautiful too, the red ones not out yet but the pink with pale yellow stamens and the frilly gaudy hot pink look wonderful from the kitchen windows. And the not-yet-flowering ones are thick with buds. I’ve got a new camellia in a terracotta pot on the front terrace, a tea one, underplanted with claret and burgundy coloured cat-faced pansies. It had a few wistful little plain white yellow-stamened flowers when I bought it but what I didn’t realise was that they were just finishing their season. Now it is covered with tiny green nodules to remind me of what I missed—or will get next year.


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Of course if I was a good gardener I would give you their proper names, but mostly they are lost, the labels fell off, I forgot, it was a long time ago they were bought. I don’t need their names to know how beautiful they are.

1 1 J u ly 2 0 0 3 Today the wall is painted—at last. Nearly a year it has been. First it was scruffily-laid poor quality bricks, then mud grey bagging, now it is the colour of lovely pale unsalted butter. Now I can plant things against it. There is a camellia in a tub that should be repotted, I shall put it in a large container against the wall—I’ve got a metal garbage bin, saw a picture of one of those in a garden magazine with plants in, looked surprisingly good. Some useful recycling. And I can put in the climbing hydrangea which has been waiting in a pot since last spring. I am so excited at the prospect of fixing up this part of the garden, it has been a long time to wait. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall ... at school our English honours teacher gave us that poem of Robert Frost’s to read and write a comprehension lesson on, and it was embarrassing, we all got it quite wrong. We did not understand what he was saying. I learned a useful lesson from that. Namely that syntax and grammar matter when you are reading a poem. Frost is writing about the fact that something seems to keep dismantling the wall his neighbour wants to build; the poet doesn’t need it or want it but the neighbour insists that good walls make good neighbours. Frost says that’s when there are animals, not fruit trees, his apple trees won’t stray into the man’s territory and eat his pine cones. We got the intelligence somehow back to front. I think the teacher knew we would, she was making sure we faced our limitations early on. It’s a dry-stone wall that Frost is talking about:


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And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance. Edna Walling is famous for using dry-stone walls though I did go and look at a garden of hers near Crookwell and the walls had mortar in them, even though they claimed to be dry stone. I love dry-stone walls. There are a lot around Séverac, a bit worn and tumbled, softened with lichen and with tiny plants growing in them, a perfect example of the human and the natural working skilfully together. I think how much I would like to live in a garden with such walls, but I doubt I will ever have the space. I’ve just found some in our local Botanical Gardens—I think. There are quite a lot of mortared walls, but in the rainforest gully there are some marvellous constructs of chunks and slabs and slices of stone, beautifully fitted together, damply green and mossy. They are certainly built on the principles of dry stone, and most ingeniously pieced together, and no mortar is visible. They are such a pleasure to look at, I just stood and gazed and patted them. And now I think of the Frost poem because I have got so fond of my wall, for mine it is, and much more now it is its milky butter colour. Even ugly grey it looked marvellous in the summer when the sun shone through the branches, and it became a screen for a moving shadow play. And I think it will be protective of plants, make life quite cosy for them. Moreover it is wonderful privacy, suggesting the mysterious magical qualities of a walled garden. And the Bev Hogg pot—how to describe it? as a horizontal crescent shape with a long curly comma tail—which I was privately rather disappointed in, it didn’t look very good at all on the old grey wall, now looks lovely; the new colour suits it. The painter is very pleased with himself, aren’t I lucky, he says, to have it so nicely done, and he has hurt none of the plants nearby.


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2 2 J u ly 2 0 0 3 A great mob of currawongs has invaded the garden. They fly in dangerous swooping dives, sometimes into the windows, swinging about in the leafless branches. They sing the cold weather; when I listen to their melodious calls I hear the frost being summoned. You can feel ropes of cold being pulled out of the earth by their glorious voices. So beautifully they sing, and yet they are such monsters. With cuckoo habits, laying their young in others’ nests, their offspring kicking out the hosts’ babies and monopolising all their attention. They are like the butcher birds of May Gibbs, greedily carnivorous, though not the same species. Once I’d been away, and came back to a narrative that had disturbed Graham and Lucy. The cat had brought in a mouse, carrying it in her mouth carefully like a kitten, and let it go in the kitchen. It ran all about. Lucy shut the cat in a bedroom and they tried to chase the mouse out the French doors, with brooms and shouts and such. Finally they got it to run outside. They watched its little furry pinky grey body dart across the terrace. Suddenly there was a huge black swooping shadow. A currawong had flown down and snapped it up. They watched the great bird alight on a branch and eat the mouse crack crack in two mouthfuls. The camellia is now in its garbage bin. I had decided it was a bit too shabbily vernacular but Nancy said not and so did John so we have done the transplanting. Hoping the buds won’t all fall off, it is thick with them. So far they haven’t. It looks wonderful at just the place where the wall joins the brush fence. It was an oddly flat and widespreading little tree and this is right for the space, and the garbage bin doesn’t quite disappear but it sort of merges, so it all looks very settled and belonging. I think it looks better than a new giant ceramic or terracotta pot. In its old pot, a Chinese honey-brown dragon one with a piecrust edge, I have put the surviving cream and pink small-flowered


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scented camellia; it stands on the wall of the terrace and I hope it flourishes as its predecessor did for so many years. I also planted the climbing hydrangea on the other side of the wall space. This is my third attempt to establish one of these self-climbing pillars of flowers, so the label describes and pictures it. And since I saw a Pierre de Ronsard rose on a gardening show I have coveted him, and will try to get one for the other side of the arch; he can meet Cécile Brunner in the middle and they can riot all rosy-pink together. And the daphnes are coming into bloom. The garden is full of their scent. I am transported back to Bruce Hall; Nancy and I used to walk into town and buy a sprig of daphne for sixpence at the florist and put it in a jar on the windowsill, above the radiator, and it would drench the room in its warm perfume. We lived in the end rooms of the building, she on the ground floor, I on the second, and would run up and down the stairs whenever we wanted something, a book, some coffee, or an invitation to drink sherry (I remarked how Oxbridge Bruce Hall was) or a word or a poem. Currawongs and daphne, the songs and smells of winter.

2 8 J u ly 2 0 0 3 Yesterday we walked around the garden and examined various plants, checked that the repotted camellias were still doing well, very robust they are, noticed the daffodils have fat little bud stems. There are quite a lot of miniature cyclamen flowering. Eventually the camellia flowers fall off the trees, often in almost perfect condition, so I collected some and put them in a shallow bowl of water, rainwater from recent showers, on the garden table. It’s a pottery bowl by Ian Jones, a bit wonky and pitted, a second, but very handsome. Its off-centre oval shape is very pleasing. This morning the water in the bowl is frozen solid, and the flowers, hardly even beginning to brown, are caught fast in a round disc of ice.


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I confess that I don’t always throw out flowers when they begin to die. It seems cruel, somehow, saying I only like you if you are young and perfect. Like chucking out old people because they are a bit wrinkled and creaky-boned. Sometimes I see visitors looking oddly at my withering flowers, thinking I am a sloppy housekeeper, and I might explain that ageing and shabbiness have their own beauty, if you look at them in the right frame of mind. John likes to give me proteas, and mixed bunches of Australian native flowers, and they age magnificently, drying and darkening, becoming stiff and brittle, but not wilting or browning or rotting. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. A nice little moral, that. I do throw them out before they get to the stinking fester stage. It’s Shakespeare, that line, in the sonnets; I’d somehow been remembering it as Tennyson. Sounds Tennysonian. It’s certainly true.

15 August 2003 The weather has been grey, drizzly, damp, normally weather to dull the senses and make you wonder why we need winter. Curse Persephone for eating those seeds of pomegranate in the underworld. But now the usual weather conversations begin with smiles, and isn’t it wonderful? And we all agree that yes it is, and no, it hasn’t broken the drought. But thank goodness for it, and if only it keeps up. The trees are completely bare, just traceries of fine black against the sky, so beautiful, whether the sky is blue or grey, and recently in this dull weather they remind of living in Cambridge for a term, in 1966, and these bare trees against the sky the evidence of the foreign-ness, the wonderful overseas-ness, of that place, the first time I had been out of my own country. Why so strange, I ask myself, since I came from Canberra which did have such bare trees, and the answer was it didn’t, not then, not in the new suburb where I lived, nothing higher than the waist. So now looking at the trees gives me the sense of that adventure,


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living in a flat in Barton Road, just across and down a bit from Girton, the flat spacious but exiguous, with a gas stove I reckoned belonged in the folk museum, I am not fond of the kind of gas stove that goes whomp! at you, and a pantry bigger than most kitchens. At least it didn’t have damp frozen on the walls, like others in the block. I met a young woman whose husband was a master at the Kings’ Choir School, and she showed me hers. I’d never seen damp before, let alone frozen. However much she tried to warm the place she couldn’t get rid of it, and complaining to the College hadn’t helped. Our flat got more sunlight, I think that was why we escaped. There were a number of apple trees in the garden, rather given to the moth, and I collected the fruit and cut away the bad bits and made apple purée for Lucy. She was six months old and would eat anything provided it came with apple purée. I like to think of one’s life always being available like this, that the mazy traceries of bare branches against the sky can take you back to another time when you were a different person but you can visit yourself then and remember what it felt like. I had taken Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking and Italian Food with me, and I remember Nancy and her husband and two children coming down from London to visit and I made David’s wonderful Italian potato pie, no pastry, and filled with cubes of ham and gruyère cheese. The Italian food worked well in England, it had the kind of thriftiness that I needed. I never managed to get overseas before I had children, so I never experienced the freedom of youthful travel with not much money and a great deal of energy. Well, I suppose I did have the last two things, but not the freedom. Children meant needing to stay fairly much in one place, certainly having a base that we made into home, and the result is I love that kind of travel, I hate jazzing around from one place to the next, I like the idea of living in a place and getting to know it. There are thus vast areas of the world I will never see, but certain places that I know well, and love.

*


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Last year when Lucy was in hospital and very ill I took her a terracotta pot of tiny daffodils. When she and they came home I fed them with blood and bone, and when the foliage was quite died down I stored the bulbs in one of those red plastic nets that had had oranges in it and in the autumn planted them in the garden. And now they are blooming, three little clumps of stocky little brilliant yellow daffodils. Tête à tête is their name, and they are the perfect classical shape, exactly like King Alfreds only small. They are doing well, some of the early tall daffodils have been bowed over by the rain. Lucy was thrilled to see them. She remembers very well the time in hospital, and my bringing them in, and now they are here again, and so is she, still, and the flowers are a celebration of that fact. They will multiply, and prosper, beside the paper whites growing through the wire goose and the lovely creamy encrusting blossoms of the Erlicheer.

9 September 2003 September, and officially spring, unless you think that comes with the equinox. The garden is carpeted with daffodils. The quince is covered with buds; if I get a fruit for every flower I will have to give quantities away. Some years ago I swore that I would never go away in spring because of missing the changes in the garden, and though I have not quite kept that promise to myself I am so far managing only a few days away so I don’t miss anything important. We’ve just been to Sydney for the launching of John’s book of poems at Gleebooks, which is a kind of weather shock, it feels like summer there and all the azaleas and the wisteria are out. It’s good to come home to the chill in the air and the sense that hot weather will have to wait a while. Melbourne a couple of weeks ago for the Writers’ Festival was grey and chilly and cool. I had six gigs including a panel about sex which is becoming something of a speciality of mine. I was the chair and read


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out a critical reviewer’s remark that each of the panellists had suffered from. Mine deplored the ‘unlovely middle-aged sex’ in The Fog Garden and there was a hiss of drawn breath from the audience, a good few of whom were middle-aged and would like me have not thought of such love-making as unlovely. It was all quite good fun. The audience wanted us to tell them how we drew on our experience to write about sex and all of us were determined not to do so; Michel Faber kept saying ‘I made it all up’. Annamarie Jagose talked about looking up ‘he entered her’ on Google and how virtually all the entries were sexual and were usually followed by a groan or a shriek or a quake, whereas when she looked up ‘she entered him’ it was nearly always to do with dog shows or gymkhanas. And Tobsha Learner read out a bit of steamy sex which involved just those things, him entering her and a good bit of groaning and shaking. But I think the most interesting thing in writing about sex is not the act but the desire. Much the same as with food, really. Except with food you can replace the act with a recipe and I don’t think that is a good idea with sex. My sister was at the Festival and we shared a hotel room which means that we can go to bed and talk, so instead of keeping one another up half the night we just keep one another awake. She lives in Brisbane and there was a time when we reckoned Australian literary festivals were organised with the express purpose of getting us together. The hotel we were put up in was the Windsor which is lovely for writers because it for a while keeps them in the state to which they would like to become accustomed, in fact you’d think people might be afraid it would seduce us all into writing bestsellers or sailing solo round the world so we could write a memoir about it and make enough money always to stay at the Windsor. One night a party of us went to dinner at the European which I like a lot. You imagine it might have been set up by displaced persons from


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the old Austro-Hungarian Empire sometime shortly after the war and had been growing old gracefully and graciously ever since but in fact it is quite new and actually rather sparkling with interesting wine and the kind of food I love. I sometimes go with my publisher. On one of those occasions I had the most marvellous tongue dish, and this time I asked the waiter for it. At the end of the evening I sat at a small table with the chef who was called Mario and this is what he told me to do.

C h a r - gr i l l e d o x t o n g u e w i t h p o l e n t a a n d s a l s a v e r d e | This is a recipe from the head chef’s grandmother. You begin with a German pickled tongue which you cook in a saucepan of chicken stock with peppercorns, bay leaves, a little white wine vinegar and little sugar and a mirepoix (which is the name of a pretty painted and cloistered town in the southern part of France and consists of finely chopped onions carrots celery stewed gently in butter, with thyme and bay leaf—I didn’t think to ask the chef about this since I knew what he meant, but I decided I could leave out the stewing and just use the vegetables). Simmer for one and a half to two hours until it is tender when pierced with a skewer. Leave to cool, peel, and cut it in slices at an angle across the tongue. They should be thickish, but a little less than a centimetre. Heat them up a little in the cooking liquor then char-grill. Rest for a moment and serve with:

Polenta. Infuse some milk with an onion, garlic, rosemary, thyme and bay leaf, boil and strain. Whisk in the polenta until it is cooked. It is the milk that gives it a rich creamy colour and excellent flavour.


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Salsa verde. Flat leaf parsley, capers, anchovies, cornichons, garlic, lemon rind and juice, all mixed together with olive oil and a little pepper. When I saw this dish on the menu I couldn’t resist it. I occasionally cook tongue but usually peel it while it is still warm and roll it around in the bottom of a basin and put quite a heavy weight on it. This is pressed tongue and is very good with pickles. I am a fond-of-pickles person. My father used to warn me against pickles and pepper but I don’t think they have ever done me any harm. Anyway, I also love tongue and brains and liver and kidneys, most of which I don’t get to cook very often because Lucy doesn’t care for them though I do sometimes make them for the gentleman caller. I wonder is there a kind of perverse interest here, a kind of subversion at work, or is there some peasant origin involved. When I first began to write for Epicurean it was with thoughts of France in mind, and its swift education in the relative prizing of foods, made clear in their pricing. Thus it was that lamb cutlets were dearer than duck breasts, and as for legs of lamb, they were rich folks’ food, well out of my reach. Calves’ liver was equally pricey. Pork and turkey, the latter in the form of rolled roasts (and very good with chestnuts) were the food of every day. I’ve still got a faint scar on my hand from cooking a turkey roast in a moderately antique gas oven in Lozère, in a big Le Creuset iron pot, it spat two globules of boiling fat which made a very nasty blistered burn. So when I got home the sight of cheap liver was very attractive, though of course it was my job to make sure it was young and tender, whereas in France the astronomical price paid made sure the butcher had got that part right. Kidneys were almost as outrageously dear. Here is a good way of cooking lambs’ kidneys—or baby veal ones, if you can get them. I think this recipe might have come from Vogue


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about forty years ago, when it was called rognons de veau Caroline, but I long ago lost the torn-out page, and now make it up. The essential thing is not to overcook the kidneys, they should still be slightly pink. This is an unlearned act, my mother not being very fond of offal and such but prepared to cook it provided all the nasties were frazzled away, so her kidneys and liver were very like little bits of rubber. Red was blood and blood was never a good thing except safely shut up in veins and arteries. Of course plenty of people still think so, and you can if you like cook these kidneys more, but only just so that they are no longer pink, otherwise they will get tougher and tougher.

K i d n ey s 6 lambs’ kidneys sliced a small onion (or 2 shallots) chopped 2 cloves garlic chopped parsley chopped

a measure of brandy a little white wine 3 teaspoons Dijon mustard olive oil, plus a teaspoon butter

Melt butter in a pan with the olive oil, cook onions until tender. Make the pan quite hot and add the kidneys so they sear on the outside. Add the garlic at this point. Warm the brandy and flame. Mix the mustard into the white wine and when the flames die down stir it in. Don’t put too much white wine or it will take too long to reduce and the kidneys will overcook. Start with about 3 tablespoons and add more if the sauce thickens too much before the kidneys are at the right stage of pinkness. Sprinkle parsley over when cooked. You can use red wine if you like, and if the mustard were hot and you added a little vinegar as well this would be very like English devilled kidneys, a favourite of that now utterly lost course, the savoury. I like them served with plenty of good mopping bread, but they are also fine on toast.

*


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On our last day in Melbourne, when we were exhausted, underslept, hyped-up and overstimulated and due to catch our separate planes in a short while, Rosie and I had a little lunch at the Windsor: finger sandwiches, no crusts, pale brown and white bread, buttered of course, smoked salmon with cream cheese, ham with plain mustard, paperthin beef with seedy mustard, cucumber, some fishy cream, with a little nest of salad leaves in the middle, and a glass of sauvignon blanc, followed by a silver pot each of peppermint tea, made of real leaves and with an extra pot of hot water: perfect in the circumstances. The dining room was actually closed, but they fed us this, and on the way out we saw the set-up for afternoon tea. It was Sunday, party day. Metres of table covered in white linen with every kind of cake and pastry imaginable, presented on cake stands and bowls and pillars of various heights, cakes pink, white, green, chocolate, little pots of crème brûlée, profiteroles, tarts, cream stuffs, and two great deep hemispherical silver bowls each sheathed in a second bowl to form a kind of bain-marie, heated with a spirit lamp and containing melted chocolate and I suppose some sort of sabayon, with strawberries beside for dipping in. We did not covet any of these, our dainty ladies’ sandwiches had been so just right. The foyer was crowded with people, and when at 3.30 the dining room doors were opened they all moved off in a slow surge and left it empty.

* We are going to Kate’s for a couple of days and since she gave me a huge bottle of preserved lemons made from her tree and I am still using them to make a favourite dish for entertaining I am writing it out for her. It comes from Maggie Beer’s Orchard, with of course a few changes. I was so purist about recipes in my youthful cooking days but now I never am—except for cakes but I hardly ever make them.


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C h i ck e n w i t h l e m o n s | 1—or 2 if they are small and you are numerous—of the best chickens you can get. I like free-range organic. Have them cut into pieces by the butcher. Pour some olive oil into a large flat ovenproof dish. Add, for one chicken, 24 stoned Kalamata olives and 2 preserved lemons, very carefully washed, the pith removed and the peel chopped. Sprinkle over 1 tablespoon fennel seeds. Add pepper but no salt—you need to wash the lemons quite carefully because they are likely to be salty. Stir together and leave to marinate for 1–2 hours. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Put in the chicken pieces which should fit neatly into the pan without overlapping and be nicely coated with oil. Roast for 15 minutes. Turn the temperature down to 180 and roast another 15 minutes. Remove the dish from the oven and—this is the important part and one which Maggie Beer emphasises with regard to all meats— cover and leave to rest for 10 minutes. It is the resting that completes the cooking and makes the meat tender. Garnish with chopped parsley. Maggie says to serve with polenta or pasta. I like bread, and something like crisp green beans. Or mashed potato. See how wonderfully simple this is. Perfect for entertaining since it can be done just before the guests arrive and put in the oven three-quarters of an hour before you want to eat it. The chicken is rich and succulent—so it ought to be, with its provenance—and the juices make a fine sauce. One variation I thought would be good with this is garlic. I put in a whole head, separated in cloves. But it didn’t work at all, I don’t know why; somehow the lemon, the olives and the fennel are sufficient, and anything else changes the dish’s nature and not for the better.


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What shall we have for dinner? . . . winter

The question, What shall we have for dinner, seems even harder to answer in winter than summer. In summer a salad, some cheese and fruit, light cool food, is simple. In winter we think of hot and warming—not necessarily synonymous—full-flavoured and nourishing, and that takes more organisation. But it also has the advantage that it may last more than one meal. A casserole or a soup can turn up a few times, and after the first is practically effortless. And one that is easy to make in the first place is a gift. When I was a student in Bruce Hall a friend and I went to visit her aunt Penelope in her house in Arthur Circle with its old garden and the rooms pervaded with a faint odour of soot from open fires, which I found extremely attractive. I longed to live in a dim chilly Canberra house with a riotous damp garden. Penelope was keen on herbs, and she showed me a pretty little book, Fragrance and Flavour, by Rosemary Hemphill, who was an important person in her generation in getting us interested in the cultivation and use of herbs, with accounts of the plants, and wonderful snippets from folklore and literature, as well as recipes. She had a herb farm near Sydney, and the family is still in the business—there is currently a Hemphill talking about spices in a


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television program. I was at that time suffering from an urgent desire to live in my own place, cook my own food, grow my own plants. I rushed out and bought the book, as the next best thing. It’s an elegant little hardback, published by Angus & Robertson, on fine cream paper with decorations in a fairy-tale medieval mode, by Pixie O’Harris, who illustrated favourite books of my childhood; every now and then I go to the National Library to have a read of The Rocks of Han, since my copy is long lost. This recipe is out of Hemphill’s next book, Spice and Savour, and it is wonderfully easy, since you do not need to brown the meat. This doesn’t seem to result in any loss of flavour, and all the ingredients cook down into a rich amalgamation. Like all such dishes, it happily reheats. I cook it in a big blue cast-iron pot, a Scandinavian one. The Christmas that Lucy was nearly two my parents came to stay, and I decided to cook duck with cherries. We went to town on Friday night and bought the pot at David Jones. I remember walking round Civic on a warm summer evening in December. Lucy had been in her little pusher, but then we made her walk and put the blue iron pot in the pusher, it was so heavy. She didn’t mind, and it was more fun carrying her when she got tired than the bulky boxed pot. The duck with cherries was I recall very good, my father agreed that yes indeed it was, but in his opinion you couldn’t beat the classical stuffed chook. Of course he was right, but I was rather dashed to have him say so. I don’t think I have cooked it since. Duck with turnips, yes, and with green olives, but not cherries. The stew is in the chapter on rosemary, of which, Hemphill tells us, the sprigs were good for warding off black magic, the flowers for rekindling lost energy, and the wood for making lutes and carpenters’ rules. As well as the never-forgotten rosemary for remembrance. Apparently rosemary, whose name means dew of the sea, flourishes best when grown near it. I had heard that it grew only in the gardens of the


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righteous, which worried me because whenever I planted it did not thrive and soon died. However I seem to be all right now, though my plants are not exactly lusty. The dish is simply named; this is my version:

Beef with tomatoes 1 kilo gravy beef or shin, cut up in strips 3 rashers of bacon, sliced in strips too 1 glass red wine 2 tins diced tomatoes a handful of small garlic cloves

2 onions, sliced several sprigs of rosemary 2 bay leaves 10 juniper berries pepper

Put the meat into your pot, cover with the bacon, add rest of ingredients and cook at about 150° for four hours—this works in my oven which is very hot; 175° might be necessary. You could add carrots. And olives near the end of the cooking. If there is a little of this left, say a centimetre or two in the bottom of the pot, and you can help it along with a little more wine or stock or even water, you can make a delicious and quite different dish, good for lunch. This one is for two people:

E g g s m e u re t t e | Heat the remains of the casserole until they are bubbling gently. Carefully break in 2 or 4 eggs and poach them in the liquid. Serve with plenty of bread. Today I saw this on the menu at Silo in Kingston, and my companion ordered it. I had tripe. The sauce was purpose-made, not leftovers, and had mushrooms in it, as well as bacon and a red wine reduction. And of course this is a possibility, but I only ever bother making it with leftover stew, any kind will do, it is such a bonus of a dish in these circumstances and always makes you feel like a thrifty housekeeper.


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And that faint odour of soot that lurks in old Canberra homes? I have heard that burning bay branches gets rid of it. So if you have a bay tree that needs pruning, and an open fire, there you are. I’m not certain about the soot smell going, but the odour of bay as it crackles and spits in the heat is wonderful. And it keeps you safe from witches. So there is a stew; what about a soup? The magazines at this time of year, as dependably as the seasons, offer hearty winter soups and warming winter dishes. I am fond of minestrone-type soups, the kind where you melt some onions in olive oil and then add vegetables in order of the length of cooking time needed, starting with the earthy ones, and at some point adding water, so at the end you have a fresh soup, with the beans and zucchini only just cooked and the potatoes tender. Of course when you heat this up later they all become mushier but that is part of the charm. This is capable of infinite variation. You can use stock instead of water, add cabbage, choose to put in tomatoes or not. You can puree the whole thing or crush it a bit with a potato masher. You can have the vegetables big and chunky or finely chopped, even grated. You can have it quite liquid or a kind of vegetable stew. If you have got some pesto left over from the summer you can add it and make a soupe au pistou, which strictly speaking calls for just basil and garlic and oil, but which works very well with the more complex sauce. You can grate parmesan into it. You can add barley, or pasta, or various kinds of pulse. And if you are drinking a pleasant ordinary red wine you can slosh a bit of that in as you eat it, especially delicious when the soup is very hot, so that the wine fumes a bit. When I was in first-year high school we had to go to the school over the road once a fortnight and do cooking, so we didn’t grow up ignorant intellectuals. We were Newcastle Girls’ High, they were Home Science High. There was great enmity between us and we hated going. We were proud and snobbish and thought they were all thick, and


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though the schools were supposed to be academically equal the fact was cleverer girls tended to go where Latin and French were taught, not home science—later it changed its name to Domestic Science and later still Hunter. Their teachers didn’t care for us either and always called us in acid dismissive disgusted tones High School, when everybody knew we were Girls’ High. We had white aprons and little white Dutch girl caps, which our mothers had made—we took home a pattern diagram which they had to enlarge and make: fancy that. I don’t think we ever learnt anything, owing to the mutual stand-off between us and the teachers. I do remember making soup, with a lot of boiled vegetables, especially pumpkin and carrot so that it was extremely orange, and we had to push it through a sieve. Whatever for? We muttered amongst ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would purée soup. Especially when it was such hard work and so messy. We all thought it was the stupidest thing. And the result, disgusting. Looked like sick and smelt like it too. Even babies wouldn’t eat such muck. The other day I had some vegetable soup left and thought I would puree it, just for a change, using the electric wand. It must have had a lot of carrot in it, for suddenly there I was, back in the great echoing cream-varnished kitchen at Home Science, pushing vegetable soup through a sieve. Only this time it smelled delicious. And I did think, not for the first time, what little monsters we were at school, but it was not just us, the teachers were monsters too, they could have taught us differently. We were good girls, mostly, and could have been convinced of the interest and importance of what we were doing. But what’s interesting is that something I remembered perfectly well as disgusting returned after all these years as an involuntary memory of deliciousness. These thoughts about soup reminded me of talking about mock chicken sandwiches to Claudia the other day, as we were eating elegant finger food at the National Gallery. We laughed, thinking how strange,


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chicken is just so available, so ordinary, these days, fancy imitating it. What of course you imitated was the flavour of the stuffing; you cooked a peeled tomato and some onion, in butter or more likely margarine, scrambled an egg through and put in it the kind of dried herbs that you used in chicken stuffing; it ended up quite dry and stiff. This seems to me sad, I don’t at all care for dried herbs, and the idea that we were once so starved for savoury flavours that we valued this is odd. But they did seem delicious, as indeed was the chicken stuffing, and that’s what matters. Next day Claudia sent me this email: Re the mock chicken which I must say does taste quite delicious—I certainly couldn’t tell you last night ... because everyone, everyone used to say it looked just like vomit! And it does there is no denying it. So when Mum sent me off to a fellowship tea with my ‘plate’—I guess I was 14—after all the boys had made terrible jokes about the vomit sandwiches, one of my friends asked me if I had brought them and I lied immediately and said oh no, I brought scones. I can remember it soooooooooo clearly—a summer evening in the church hall before going to Evensong—we all went to see the boys, not because of God really. Anyhow, I told Mum to never, ever, ever make me take mock chicken anywhere again. I came across my recipe, in my mother’s handwriting, and it brought back what a treat it was, and how rare. Maybe I’ll do some next time we have a party. I love sandwiches on these occasions, I could make them in small crustless rectangles. Except I think I’d have to use fresh herbs.

* French people have traditionally eaten their several-coursed meat meals at lunch time. When I got married Graham remarked that he liked this habit of dinner in the middle of the day—remarked


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hopefully, I could tell. When he was a student in France he got used to it. But we never did do it really, I think perhaps I resisted the notion that I should cook an extra meal, because of course the evening meal after such a midday dinner is still a good bit more complicated than a simple lunch of sandwiches. I think he envisioned himself coming home at midday to a fine hot dinner. And doubtless that is a healthier way to eat. These days Lucy and I still have light lunches and we don’t often want very heavy dinners either. So a bowl of soup with a lot of vegetables is an excellent thing. And then you can have some cheese afterwards, a proper platter with sourdough bread or perhaps some biscuits. There’s no use pretending that these soups are very quick to make. Cutting up all those vegetables does take time. But they do a number of meals, and tinned soups cannot compare. I laugh at those ads where somebody’s mum snorkels out to the fishing boat with cans of soup and everybody is beside themselves with joy, at the same time as I am enraged. If we see any truth in these messages then we are a sad lot. Although we eat even dinner parties in the kitchen—the architect designing it said, Don’t regard it as a kitchen you eat in but a dining room you cook in, which is exactly how it is—I still don’t always want to cook whole meals after visitors arrive. Especially as we might be having a meeting or planning something. So when I came across this recipe of Stefano de Pieri I saw it as just the right sort of simple spectacular dish that you can produce at the last minute to the amazement of guests. I am a bit of a performer at times with my cooking, I like to amaze people. Especially when it is easy. One of the charms of this dish is that it is an old-fashioned goodie that a lot of people have forgotten about, or never known. It used to be a staple for Christmas, probably because ham was much more expensive, and would not have been eaten hot at all, which again is more economical, you’re not carving off steaming chunks of hot meat but slender slices of cold.


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P o a ch e d p u m p e d l a m b | This is a leg of lamb that has been pickled, or corned, that is, pumped, by the butcher. I asked for it almost idly, thinking he’d say, Oh no, not much call for those these days. But he produced a lovely big fat one. After it has been poached it is a wonderful fine dark red colour; if it has not been carefully pickled it will have greyish streaks to the meat, but this butcher had done his job perfectly.

1 leg of lamb, pumped, or corned 1 fat carrot—sliced 1 brown onion—sliced celery—chopped

10 peppercorns 5 cloves 1 piece star anise

Put all the ingredients into a large pot (the big blue Scandinavian one is good) cover with water and cook gently until the meat is tender. De Pieri says the star anise is optional but I think it is the best thing about the dish. Along with the turnips.

Mashed turnips 4 large turnips cut in chunks 1 cup milk A little salt Half cup stale bread broken

White or red wine vinegar to taste (he specifies, not balsamic) Extra virgin olive oil Chopped garlic

Boil the turnips in the milk with just enough water to cover. When they are tender drain and puree with the rest of the ingredients; I used a wand. The turnip is not starchy like potato, it makes an elegant slightly liquid puree which is partly sauce and tastes heavenly. De Pieri suggests serving it with sweet mustard fruits but I was feeling a bit economical when I was shopping for this—they were $40 a small jar for the imported kind, though you can get Australian ones


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cheaper—so I served it with some good French mustard instead. As well as spinach; you need something green. The liquid the meat has cooked in makes an excellent soup. You need to take the fat off. It is a thick, in fact quite gelatinous, broth; I added water and various vegetables to hand, as well as some cooked brown lentils; the earthy root vegetables go well with it, and somehow I didn’t think tomato was right. So you have more meals, soup followed by cold pickled lamb, which also makes wonderful open sandwiches for lunch, with mustard and thinly sliced red onion dressed with a little mild vinegar. These winter dishes aren’t effortless, but you can do them at odd times, so that when you come home cold and hungry, there they are, ready just for heating. The lamb takes about two hours to cook, I had it prepared to start cooking at 5.30 and at 7.30 it was ready for guests.

* Food is so much about memory, about the past, and about happiness in the past—unless we are very unlucky. It is not often that the miserable moments are remembered in delicious food. I have been going back to the dishes I cooked when I was first married, when I was discovering their possibilities, mainly with the help of Elizabeth David, and there was opening before me a whole prospect of life, and adventure, and good food. This is a daube, a stew, so named for the dish it cooks in. David’s section on these dishes in French Provincial Cooking begins with a quotation: ‘O, scent of the daubes of my childhood’ which goes on to evoke the wonderful smells in the old family kitchen and the sound ‘like a little bubbling spring’ from the pot which has been murmuring on the stove all day, from a cookbook published in 1936 called The Best Recipes of My Poor Mother by Pierre Huguenin, a title which has always fascinated me: why was she poor? and anyway the dish is his grandmother’s.


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I used to read bits of Elizabeth David aloud to Graham, and he was very taken with them, and chose passages to give to students for French prose, partly because they were so beautifully written and partly because he thought there was much to be learned from them. He specially liked the bit where she talks about rubbing salad bowls with garlic, and remarks acerbically that it depends on whether you want to eat the bowl or the lettuce. She had good robust tastes and wrote memorably of them. When I was young I was very purist and followed recipes exactly. But this one is somewhat adapted. And clearly it is a set of suggestions, you can add more or less of various ingredients.

L a d a u b e d e b o e u f P ro v e n ç a l e — P ro v e n ç a l b e e f s t e w a tin of chopped tomatoes (read 1500 grams gravy beef the label and avoid ones with 300 grams salt pork sugar and thickeners) 125 grams pork rind 3 x 2 cm strips fresh orange peel 4 carrots cut crosswise in 3 fresh bay leaves chunks 6 sprigs thyme 2 onions sliced a handful of parsley chopped a bulb of baby garlic, or a 3 tablespoons olive oil handful of cloves a cup of red wine Cover the bottom of a large heavy pot with the olive oil. Dice the salt pork and spread over it. Cut the meat in large slices (David suggests ‘the size of half a postcard’) and add half. Add the vegetables, the herbs. Cover with the rest of the meat and then the pork rinds cut in small dice. They are tough to cut, but if you stand them on end instead of trying to cut them flat they will work much better. Put the pot over a low heat for ten minutes—this is really just to get it hot so you are not putting a vast cold pot into the oven. Heat the red wine in a saucepan


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until it just begins to simmer, light it, and pour it over the meat. It won’t flame much but I like doing it. Add a little hot water if the liquid level seems too low—I add a cup. Cover the pot with foil and its lid and cook in a low oven for about three hours—I did it at about 130 degrees. Half an hour before the end add half a cup of stoned kalamata olives—these and the tomatoes are what make it Provençale. You can serve it with a persillade; a large handful of parsley chopped with some cloves of garlic, anchovies and capers, and mixed with lemon juice, which is lovely and sharp and fresh with the rich meat. And in France it would often have pasta, thick ribbons, mixed with some of the sauce, or rice, but I like bread, and a green vegetable, like snow peas, or sugar snap, or green beans. Like all these dishes it is good cooked one day and heated the next. You can let it cool and take the fat off if you wish, though I was surprised how little there was. It is wonderfully gelatinous thanks to the rinds. And it is a big pot, to feed a lot of people, or a smaller family twice, and it’s another wonderful base for eggs meurette. Moreover it’s easy and even quite quick to make, though of course not last minute—until the next day. And I love the sense of being a thrifty housewife that I get from having a great dish like this available.

* Lucy is my bookkeeper, so after we have been to the accountant to do the quarterly tax (pathetic, with my infrequent income, but I am a small business—I shouldn’t imagine they come any smaller), we go to Silo for lunch. Lucy has a pizza, which is very good, hardly surprising since bread is what Silo is about. It is artichoke heart (actually a paste spread over the dough) and fresh goats’ cheese with lettuce leaves, so it is a bread disc with a bright green inner circle dotted with crumbly white. I don’t have tripe this time, but cassoulet. It comes in a little


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black iron pot of the kind that garlic prawns were served in, in my youth. With it I have a glass of Sicilian wine, Donnafugato ... After a while the woman at the next table leans over a little and asks what it is like. Nice, I say, a bit simple and inky, but good with the cassoulet. She was interested, she says, because it is the name of a character in the novel, The Leopard. I suppose that is the Sicilian connection, I say. Isn’t it amazing, you never know when literature will crop up. We buy a lot of goodies, small quiches Lorraine for dinner, a passionfruit tart for Lucy, some sourdough rye bread, a large brioche loaf cooked in a rectangular tin, and cheese. They have a kind of Roquefort, which is made entirely authentically but of pasteurised milk, and it tastes remarkably genuine, creamy and blue. After we have eaten our quiches, and a salad made of soft lettuce and a truss tomato which was madly expensive but fortunately tastes almost worth it, we toast slices of the brioche and spread Roquefort cheese on them. This is heavenly. The whole thing almost a takeaway meal. A good first course is small brioches with their loaf shaped tops cut out and a bit of the crumb hollowed out and filled with a mixture of Roquefort (or some creamy blue) mixed with a little light sour cream or crème fraîche and the tops pressed back on, cooked in a moderate oven just enough to heat them through. The hot cheese runs bubbling through the little loaf and it is very good. The toast which was Lucy’s clever thought is a simple version of this. When I am in Séverac I like to go to the village of Roquefort, near Saint Affrique, and visit the caves, and buy cheese—there are levels even of genuine cheese, it must all have the little red sheep on it, but if you can get an artisanal one it is even more delicious—and wonder at the great mountain, whose deep caves have air vents called fleurines, through which waft mysterious little breezes, making the penicillin mould react with the sheep’s milk cheese to produce just that texture and flavour. It’s come a long way since the primordial shepherd boy left


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a bit of bread and cheese in a cave and came back several months later and found it, all mouldy but he was so hungry that he ate it, and voilà, the world’s greatest cheese—so say some people—was born. Some friends in the village posted us a good chunk once, it was during one of the postal embargoes when the French were behaving badly in the Pacific so it was delayed coming. When it arrived the inner parcel was extremely greasy and ripe, but it tasted wonderful. We didn’t have the heart to tell them how illegal it all was. Even the rare artisanal establishments are fairly much laboratories these days, with the marrying of mould and curd not left to any chance. And they are also tourist attractions, many of them are open for tours, with of course opportunities for buying at the end. But because the tour takes you through the mountain, and you can feel the mysterious breezes on your face, it’s fascinating. And it is interesting that this faux Roquefort should taste so good, since the pasteurising process is supposed to kill the penicillin which is what makes the cheese.

* I asked Leanne, who with her husband Graham is Silo, for her tripe recipe. She was happy to give it to me, but when I discovered that it sits a good part of a day and night in the turned-off baker’s oven so it cooks meltingly slowly I decided it wouldn’t be much use.

* Winter is a time when thoughts may turn to puddings. My mother made marvellous steamed ones, often using suet, with golden syrup, or raisins, which gave you spotted dog, good hefty peasant food for workers. We had them with custard, never cream. My father hated milk. When he was a lad his mother had a little shop on Stockton, and since there was no refrigeration he had to drink up the leftover milk


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every evening. Warm souring milk; he couldn’t stand it. Neither could I; the milk that we got at school recess was often left in the sun. Cream was as bad, for him (not for me) so all cream in our house was mock. That was another reason why we never had sponge cakes; they don’t lend themselves to mock cream. But there were wonderful bread and butter custards, and lemon meringue pies, rice puddings and baked apples, all sorts of homely English things. When Lucy makes rice pudding she uses Jane Grigson’s recipe, which involves cooking a tiny amount of rice with a great deal of rich milk and cream for a long time, and I have to say that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to my mother’s. Hers was good, a great childhood memory, but rather more stodgy. She made it in a pale yellow enamel pie dish, with a flat rim outlined in green; I can recall it vividly because I so often washed it up, scraping off the caramelised bits. What strikes me about this recall is how small the dish was; you never got much of things in our house.

* Writers are supposed to have unhappy childhoods but I didn’t. My parents loved one another, and us. My father was a patriarch and would have liked to have a son, but did not make any of his three daughters think she should have been he. In fact he made me believe that I could do and be anything I wanted, and school, that selective Girls’ High, had expectations which reinforced that notion. Of course there were a lot of things at home that we didn’t have, couldn’t have, but however much this disappointed I did understand why; I knew my mother did her best, eventually; I was a rational child. Of course it wasn’t perfectly idyllic. Evil things happened: sometimes when my father set off for work he would discover that the milkman’s horse had left a pile of manure in the road and I would be


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sent out with iron shovel and bucket to get it. The indignity, the injustice! It was not my role in life to collect manure. The iron of the shovel entered my soul. (Now, if I were so lucky as to have a horse in my street I would be out like a shot.) There was anger, and fighting with three girls in a small house, and the sort of fear that children always have at moments in their growing up, that maybe the world won’t be good to them. Will, when we leave home, anybody else be kind to us, love us, want to marry us? (Especially as my aunts thought a clever girl like me was doomed to spinsterhood—and that was scarcely forty years ago.) But that fear was only a momentary dark shadow, like a currawong out of the corner of the eye, in the meantime there were books, and the sea, and freedom, and love, and treats sometimes, admiration, and requirements. A great many things to do. Best of all, there was room for the imagination.


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Republics of pleasure

On the tram in Vienna the idea of little orange-scented sweetmeats made me imagine a secret garden, enclosed by a high wall, embroidered with flowers and fruit trees like an oriental carpet, where languid women with plump erotic little rolls of flesh round their navels—like girls in Australia this year in their tight jeans and cropped tops—fed themselves sweet cakes of orange and almond. Home from my travels, I sit in my own almost secret garden, solitary, not with a gaggle of houris, I’ve done my time with teenage girls and houris strike me as endlessly time-warped at that stage, and anyway I like solitude, sometimes, I sit on the teak bench against a high wall of ivy and look across the lawn, the beds, to the bagged brick wall the colour of cream. The oak trees have tall trunks and the spaces seem quite amazingly large, maybe it is the upward carved canopy of the trees, which if you squint a little you can perceive as nature’s version of Gothic vaulting. The lawn is small, most of the garden is planted with shrubs and perennials and odd flowers. I can sit on this seat and imagine nooks and corners and wandering paths. It isn’t a formal garden, no box hedges—I read they were originally meant for spreading washing on to dry. No mazes or labyrinths either, to remind of the circuitous courses of sinful man. This is the garden as paradise, suburban incarnation.


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Robert Hughes’ book The Shock of the New, published in 1980 and based on the television series offers such insights into the art of the twentieth century that I often read it. This was long before he worried us by coming to Australia and making a program about us in which we recognised so little of ourselves that we were affronted. He took it personally and so he should have; his was not the country most of us live in. It is interesting that we love to invite anciently expatriated former members of our society to come and tell us about ourselves—and then become upset at how wrong they do get us. Where do people like Germaine Greer go, to observe the weird habits that they then pontificate to us about? We’re still having parties with blokes round the keg and the women with their cups of tea in the kitchen! Don’t they know we’re all swilling chardonnay now? In that 7.30 Report, when I said that I wanted people to be more imaginative so they understand that the world is full of people like themselves, I especially wanted our government to show more imagination, which leads to compassion, I wasn’t being socialist, I was asking for people to think, to open their minds. Where there is no vision the people perish, the Bible says, in that way it has of supplying spot-on up-to-theminute comments. When odd and other people move in next door to us we as a nation tend to see that they love their children, they mow their lawns, they do their jobs, just like the rest of us, at the same time as we recognise that they are interesting individuals, just like the rest of us, but when they are sinking in a leaky boat off our coast we somehow can persuade ourselves they are alien. But some of the people watching the program couldn’t see us, couldn’t hear us, just as Hughes couldn’t when he researched his television documentary on contemporary Australia. But however Hughes gets things wrong later, The Shock of the New is good. I like what he says about painters and gardens—he is talking about the painters but I extrapolate what he says back to the gardens. So he tells us the


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Impressionists created a vision of Eden out of the everyday world. Later he talks about Matisse: ‘the common theme of Matisse’s interiors is the art of contemplating a benevolent world from a position of utter security’; you stand in a room and look out a window. One of Matisse’s visions of nature, says Hughes, is ‘the artificial paradise-garden, nature tamed, formalised and patterned to the highest degree of artifice and comfort’. As in the Alhambra, typical of the highly formalised and symbolic gardens of Islam and Christianity. (His other vision of nature is the natural paradise, like Tahiti.) Medieval books of hours capture this idea of the garden as an exquisite artefact, a painting or an embroidery made of plants, instead of pigment, or silk. I liked these ideas as expressed by Hughes so much that I used the bit about Matisse’s paradise-garden as the epigraph to The Hanged Man in the Garden story. And before I go on I should remark that this figure is not an image of despair or punishment or failure. ‘The Hanged Man dangles gallantly by one foot and turning upside down observes the world. Its powers cannot harm him, he sees it clearly and afresh, all new. He is an individual ... He does not suffer. He is fortunate.’ He is of course a character out of the Tarot pack, where things often are not what they seem. And I thought he was a good image of a person able to see her surroundings afresh, as Martha, standing in the upstairs window of her house, looks down on her garden and marvels at how different it looks from this other perspective. At this stage I was still trying to write a story about conscious happiness, and the garden is a significant part of it. She sees it through the eyes of a number of painters: naïve Rousseau eyes, anonymous medieval ones; ‘the herbs in formal squares in their sun-dialled bed’, the eyes of Monet, ‘when the roses will haze into shapes of light, or Matisse, which make a garden of the mind which reassembles objects by their own logic. Or the eyes of Bonnard, which paint their own dazzlement.’ Martha knows that it is the eye of the mind that’s important. You need a good strong mind


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with excellent imaginative eyesight to make a garden in the first place. Martha’s garden is mine, with a bit of imaginative eyesight to help it along, after all I was writing fiction and I did not need to stick to facts. The hardships and difficulties were all true to life, and if some of the rest of it was owing to vision, well that is okay, it is the role of words to achieve things that fact cannot always provide. But in a memoir you don’t fiddle with facts. If a memoir is fictional it is a novel. And so I sit on the seat against the ivy wall and look at my garden, and it is my little artificial paradise garden. I, like a goodly proportion of my fellow countryfolk, am making it for my own delight, and as a space where the outside world cannot harm me. How do I know my fellows are doing it? By the fact that every here and there in even the smallest town are large garden centres, selling not just plants, both useful and ornamental, but a vast range of objects of beautification, so we can put in sundials and fountains and statues and balls and coloured pots and gazebos and trellises and pyramids and lattices and gravel and sails and paving stones and wall plaques and wind chimes and water features. We have discovered gardens; gardens as works in progress (and sometimes instant, bought at immense expense and installed in no time, but I am not interested in them, they are too often the stuff of laughably named reality television and I hear rarely survive long), gardens as hobbies and pastimes and balm for the spirit. The seaside grass patches of my youth, the straggly geraniums in the corner, the wife growing a few stocks and pansies, the husband his vegies, with maybe a rose or two left to get on with it if you lived further inland, you can hardly find them any more. Gardening used to be something of a class thing, it was middle class to have a garden, and if you were working class, apart from the vegetables, it was extremely ambitious. Not these days. Vast numbers of us want to make gardens to live in and to make them more beautiful.


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I and a lot of Canberrans came to gardening rather by accident. I did give my parents those trees, the summer of my eighteenth birthday, and I did hanker after roses as a child, but by the time I was married I was keen on the urban apartment life, far too full of cultural activities for gardening. Graham had lived in Paris and Cambridge for the last five years, certainly with gardens but kept by people whose job it was. (There’s a story about how you get a Cambridge college lawn: well, you water it and you feed it and you mow it and you roll it and you do that for 400 years or so and there you are.) He said rather sadly when we moved into our suburban house: I have always seen myself as a citydwelling intellectual. But we couldn’t afford that; subsidised rents meant that a mortgage was cheaper than a flat, if you weren’t one of the great many lucky subsidees. The government gave you forty shrubs and ten trees and if you hadn’t taken up the offer after a year or two wrote a sharp letter telling you to get on with it. Our block was a clay pan full of builder’s rubble. The area had never had much in the ways of trees, it was after all the Limestone Plains, though up by the shops you can see an ancient avenue of immense trees, but here it was improved pasture, full of subterranean clover and before that, grassland. I used to get out in my swimsuit with the idea that I would get a tan as well as clear the junk. What happened was I got covered with dirt that turned to sweaty mud. Brown I was but not with a tan. I’m still getting it right. We did some spectacular things, a less optimistic person than me might say, made some spectacular mistakes, like dropping handfuls of acorns across the middle of the yard, and planting a pine tree that my mother rescued from a bulldozer on a country road. The pine tree had to go when it got twice as tall as the house, making the garden dark as a cave, and we are now down to three giant oaks. The maple we put in the centre of the lawn for taking tea under one day did not thrive and the mulberry has fruit that is


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tasteless, lacking both sugar and acid. A beautiful tall cryptomeria died, and the peach and nectarine trees which fruited so beautifully for many years, provided you did the right complicated spraying, have gone. The silver birch threatens to go, but hangs on. It suffers from having to be pruned out from the electricity wires which loop across the back; the estate agent told us that they were to go underground any minute. I don’t know if he knew he was lying but they never have. When Graham got ill the garden was in okay shape except for a corner that was overgrown with ivy and various junky weeds. I advertised for a handyperson to help me maintain it and got a nice young man who was willing but a bit clumsy. He had very big feet in large boots and was always standing on precious plants so I put him to work clearing the corner, which had the effect of making the whole yard look much bigger. I used to wheel Graham out to look and discuss what we would do with it. We fleetingly considered having a formal parterre with gravel beds and walks, box hedges and gardenias, but decided that it was too stiff, not really us. The young man had unearthed a number of river stones so we decided to make what a gardening book described as woodland. The ivy was beaten back to the wall and we got the teak bench. I think how graceful Graham was. He knew he wouldn’t see it. Yet he gave it his attention. He was so elegant. When he died and I put in the funeral notice Garden Flowers Only Please, meaning no wreaths, Judy told people it meant flowers to plant in the garden, which was a marvellous thing because I got all sorts of gifts and can now see that area as Graham’s garden. Camellias, and a rhododendron, the medlar, a star jasmine, a miniature persimmon, some hostia, some aquilegia, a tree peony, a lot of campanula. In an antiques shop at Lockhart I found an iron bust of a woman with rather bare breasts and what I have decided is a Phrygian cap, so I am sure she is a version of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. Marianne


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is always modelled on a contemporary beauty, Catherine Deneuve was one and before her Brigitte Bardot; a place you can see their images is on postage stamps, but they also model busts for town halls and such. But I think mine is nineteenth century. She is a beauty of the industrial age. Every year in November a certain great plot of lilies comes out and I invite friends to a lily-viewing party. The lilies began life in a small plastic pot, bought at a street market, six or seven years ago, two leafy spikes with white flowers just coming out of bud. November lilies, Madonna lilies: the flowers you see in paintings of the Annunciation, in a silver pot on the floor, or a ledge, or maybe in the arms of the angel. My gardening book tells me that their Latin name is Lilium candidum, that they grow to six feet, that they are beautifully scented and have up to twenty trumpet-shaped blooms. They come from Southern Europe and are one of the oldest species in cultivation, so you can see why they are there so alive in medieval and renaissance paintings. When my pot finished blooming I put them in the garden and after a year or two they started coming up and growing denser and now there are masses of leafy spikes each one with a cluster of flowers, and so tall that you hardly have to bend your head to put your nose to them. They are so splendid they need a party to themselves, so each year I invite fifteen or twenty people for drinks one evening and the point is to look at them. The Japanese make trips at certain seasons to admire certain flowers, but I think they might involve rather more rituals, or at least formal modes of behaviour, because they have been happening for a long time. Mine is fairly accidental, the lilies being so marvellous, and the party is some decent food and wine to drink. I put some old faded pink kilim cushions on the teak bench and on the edge of the terrace but mostly guests stand up and move around and talk. Now whenever I see lilies in a pot I buy them and keep them inside until they finish flowering then plant them out; it takes a couple of years but then they flower again. At the moment I have some yellow


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Asiatic lilies in a blue and white bowl on the kitchen table. They’ll die back soon and I’ll plant them out. We all know that gardens are good reminders of mortality. Death is always happening in them. Sometimes plants resurrect, spectacularly, like the lilies; they blossom and flourish, then wither and perish—as the hymn says we humans do—but then they come back next year. Sometimes. Sometimes the flourishing suddenly cark it, sometimes they never take, never do, they begin to ail from the moment they are planted. You can decide they weren’t right, or try again. Death in the garden isn’t a sinister phrase, it’s normal.

* A paradise-garden, a Garden of Eden ... in fact, mostly our gardens are fallen gardens, there is a serpent in them. Mine was illness, the cancer that destroyed the image of perfect safety. I did think that Graham and I would go on for much longer, nurturing our garden, making meals, opening bottles of wine, cosseting the house. We knew that you are never safe, really, finally, but thought it would be all right for a while. Sometimes the serpent is betrayal, a husband straying, falling in love elsewhere, a wife cheating. Sometimes children die, or money is lost, or bushfires burn the lot; that’s more apocalypse than serpent. Thanks to our sinful ancestors who got themselves expelled from Paradise, we live in an imperfect world; in the middle ages people believed that there was nothing perfect beneath the moon, the sublunary world was doomed to flaws, only above it would be perfection. The sublunary world is corrupt, uncertain, ephemeral, subject to alteration, death is inevitable. The only sure thing is its mutability. In an endlessly changing world the only certain thing is change itself. Milton wrote his mighty poem Paradise Lost to tell us that the serpent did humankind a favour, by persuading Eve to eat the apple and give it to Adam too, so they both came to a knowledge of good and


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evil. That way we may know evil and choose good, instead of being perfect because we can understand no other way. An untempted perfection isn’t interesting. Or even very conceivable: we can’t imagine heaven, not in any way that makes us think we’d like to spend eternity there. Sydney Smith offered ‘pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets’, but that would quickly pall, they are both very intense and instant things, it’s their immense momentary excitement that makes us not want them to go on too long or we would sicken and deafen. I like better Smith’s temporal view: ‘I am convinced that digestion is the great secret of life.’ Him and Joseph Conrad. And who would disagree?

* Sublunary and imperfect they may be but our gardens are very lovable and though they have their serpents they have their beauty and order that comfort us and cheer us and console us for danger and darkness and fear. We’re not down at the garden centre because we’re yuppies with too much disposable income, because we are nouveaux riches conspicuously consuming, or not just, we’re there because we somewhere somehow have learned these consoling truths. Size doesn’t matter, either; our gardens can be balconies, terraces, courtyards, it is the cherishing that counts. Voltaire at the end of Candide had his hero realise that we must cultivate our own garden—il faut cultiver notre jardin—which doesn’t just mean the literal spaces around us but the metaphorical ones as well. You could translate it as we must attend to our own affairs. But starting with the literal can be a good place. Years ago I read a remark by David Malouf, it was in the book of articles and extracts edited by Frank Moorhouse called Days of Wine and Rage. Malouf said that ‘the real achievement’ of Australian writers ‘might be in pioneering the experience of suburban man’. Leaving aside the unfortunate dating and placing of the word ‘man’ I entirely agree with him. I am not quite


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sure what he was meaning nor how ironic he was being, but I take the remark quite straight, at face value. This is because I think suburbia is a great achievement. It gets such a bad press, but I think it is a wonderful way to live. In one’s own place, with one’s own space, that one creates and cultivates, that one cossets and cares for, with shelter and privacy and comfort, where one can sleep and eat and live and work, invite one’s friends, sit under one’s own cucumber vine, that site of homely bliss, there is wine and olives and oil and pomegranates, grain and honey and milk, even if most of these have come from the supermarket. The perfect life, especially as one can escape from it now and then, and come back with great joy. A character in a story of mine writes the sentence: The alienation of

suburbia needs to be recognised as a more or less nourishing myth, a construct of a Bohemian perception of city life ... He’s a historian, and behaving badly, certainly in his betrayal of his wife and his mistress he is inviting serpents into his garden, so this is meant to be a comment on him and somewhat ironically so, as well as an idea to ponder in its own right. A throwaway line perhaps but one you pick up and uncrumple if you like. The more I look at it the more I like it. It was of course what we had in mind when we newly married wanted to be urban apartment dwellers. We did find the alienation of suburbia a nourishing myth, forced by circumstances and temporary, to be rejected as soon as possible. Now it is the fact of suburbia that I find nourishing. It’s not perfect, it needs work, I know my version of it where I am friends with my neighbours, and kids once again play in the street, safe from much traffic and real violence though there are burglaries and drug-related break-ins, I know this version is more attractive than some, but it is still a useful ideal. Suburbia is where life happens, where people live and love one another and raise their children, where there is grief and recrimination and murder and pain, it is where the human comedy unfolds. It’s potentially a good life. My father used to


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say, at moments of difficulty, It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. Indeed it is. Speaking again about Matisse, Hughes says that his painting ‘The Red Studio’ is a poem about the way in which art refers to itself; ‘how it nourishes itself from other art and how, with enough conviction, art can form its own republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise’. Republic of pleasure ... fabulous phrase. I want to call a story by that name. For now I shall use it for this chapter. A painting is a poem and a garden is art. I like to think of suburbia as full of small republics of pleasure where words and food and the colour of the walls and the paintings on them and the crab apples in spring and the bird feeder hanging in the tree are all part of the minor works of art we make of our lives. My iron Marianne might be someone else’s plaster gnome, but these are republics, so the choices in this flawed world beneath the changing moon are free. Some of them, at any rate.


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A sufficiently exciting occupation

When you garden with the eye of the mind, you create certain ideal spaces for it to dwell upon. One of mine is the kitchen garden, the potager, as glossy magazines like to say. I build a large rectangular enclosure of old mellow bricks, a rosy apricot in colour, and against them I espalier fruit trees, pears, apples, greengages, peaches. There are cherries in a cage, canes of raspberries, beans on trellises. Red and black currants, gooseberries, strawberries. In deep fertile beds edged with box grow the vegetables of the season, salads, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, the brassicas, peas, broad beans to pick while still babies. How they flourish, for my mind is a good gardener. In the middle is a knot garden, with a sundial, for growing herbs, and round it a lavender hedge, for sleep-inducing pillows and scented linen. It sounds like the garden of Eden, but it isn’t, it is essentially a postlapsarian garden, a garden made full in the knowledge of good and evil, that values abundance because it has known famine, whose walls acknowledge the fragility of its microclimate, whose tilth has learned that food depends on work. And it is the garden of another hemisphere. It could allow me the opportunity to say, Oh indeed, we brought our head gardener from England twenty years ago and he’s been invaluable, a remark I actually heard on the ABC television gardening program. And even so, it was not said of a walled potager, but of a partly native


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garden on a slope. For so anciently northern an artefact is going to have to remain a garden of the mind in its antipodes. And of course, that is what most gardens are, gardens of the mind. They all begin like that, and many stay that way. Others try to stop being an idea and become some more or less successful incarnation of it. And so much of our gardening is a deeply mental process, rooted in our own and our people’s histories. When Cassandra heard I was writing about such gardens, she said to me, I don’t know why you are doing this, you don’t even grow vegetables, at least I’ve had some practical experience, I actually do produce them. And she’s right. Down in Lower Snug she grows superb vegetables. I live on a smallish suburban block with three huge oak trees and a beautiful though disappointing mulberry. A lot of my gardening effort is spent committing quercicide; without that there would be a million oak trees. What would happen if they were left to themselves? Would it be a survival of the fittest? Or would the house be squeezed in a Sleeping Beauty grip of enlaced oak tree forest? I plan not to find out. The result of all this is that I grow very good shade and vegetables do not flourish. The greengages seem to have got going, and I do have two crab-apples. The quince is beginning to provide a green view to a downstairs bedroom. My herbs prosper and I’ve got a dodgy bay tree taller than the house. And that’s the clue. The tallness. I love tallness. I grew up by the sea. A hundred metres or so from Merewether Beach which is a long wild beach with nothing to stop the sea winds that come roaring in from three directions. They are loaded with salt and glassy-sharp sand, that scour and scrape the land, that hollow it out. Stunted bushes flee hunchbacked before them. It is beautiful, with its immense horizons, its great bowl of blue sky, but it isn’t gentle or kind. I longed for trees, and roses. When I came to live in Canberra, on that small suburban block, which until a year or two before had been improved pasture from the days of Campbell of Duntroon’s sheep, and


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where nothing grew higher than a stalk of paspalum, I couldn’t wait to begin planting those forty shrubs and ten trees the government gave new house owners as part of the deliberate creation of a garden city. The oak trees came from a handful of acorns picked up by a child. How amazing, we said, mighty oaks really do from little acorns grow. We did plant some vegetables in those early days, but always we seemed to go away in the middle of summer just as they began ripening, and anyway that was when they were at their best and cheapest in the shops. I think the truth was that our hearts weren’t in it. And yet, I come from ancient stock of vegetable growers. My father made long rectangular beds in his back garden, surrounding them with concrete paths and digging out the sand—sand as in seaside, sand as in sandhills—to two spades’ depths and filling them with excellent soil, so that however much he dug them over there would be no chance of the sand seeping up into the rich dark earth. He grew tomatoes, and mignonette lettuces long before they were fashionable, beans on lattices, cabbages, strawberries, pumpkins, radishes whose mild fine taste I still remember, carrots ... always from seed because he thought seedlings were too expensive. Then there was rhubarb, and passionfruit vines. My grandfather fed a family of six children on the produce of his garden. It was large, at least an acre, with lawns and trees as well. Before my time part of his land was sold and another house built on it. He died when I was seven. I remember beetroot, and sweet salad onions, the reason I love onions, and persevere even with hot ones, and he had fruit trees as well, his land was a bit farther from the sea and his soil rich and sheltered. His roses were wonderful. And there was a loquat tree, whose mouth-puckering fruit was a dare among the grandchildren. In a back room of their house was a well, set flush in the floor, very deep, which he used for watering and washing his vegetables, but pretty much before my time; we lived with them for a while


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when I was two, while the house on the sandhills was being built, and they filled it in I case I fell in. Though why none of the six children did or were feared for I do not know. My grandparents’ house had a tiny cliff in front of it with a little marshy creek at the bottom. Beyond this were houses, in my memory, but in earlier times there had been market gardens, run by Chinese. An acquaintance of mine was doing some research into the response of Australians to these Chinese gardeners, so I asked my mother whether my grandfather had any prejudices about buying vegetables from them. Not at all, she said, though he didn’t actually buy any because he grew his own, but he bought seedlings from them, and dressed rabbits. He had a saying, that when he died he was going to come back as a Chinaman’s horse, because they treated them so well. A famous thing about the Chinese was their practice of using their own excrement and urine to fertilise their plants. But health studies showed no problems, they were never ill with typhoid or diphtheria, and they cleaned their vegetables more carefully than any Europeans. But this didn’t stop people being prejudiced against them. And the nightsoil men victimised them. Another feature and possible problem was that they worked so hard. A journalist called E. M. Clowes wrote about this in 1911. ‘You see a lot of white men working in the market gardens around Oakleigh and Garden Vale,’ she said. ‘They stop to talk with each other, to look round at the sky and distant landscape, to enjoy a few quiet puffs at their pipes; above all, to spit on their hands. The Chinaman never looks up, never stops from dawn until dark. He divides his ground into little oblong patches, with channels between to conserve every drop of moisture; he pampers the young weak plants, shading them from wind and sun with bits of sacking, boards, or slates; he loosens the ground unceasingly around them, and waters untiringly.’ This was the kind of reputation the Chinese still had with my family, decades after


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their gardens had disappeared under suburban housing. But Miss Clowes didn’t actually recommend such hard work. She thought that ‘a man ... must have something of a soul beyond early tomatoes and green peas’ and ought to stop and look at the world sometimes, though he could learn habits of diligence from ‘the alien in his midst’. The Chinese gardeners were known for planting by the phases of the moon, which I think my father also thought was a good idea. Many people find this risible, I’m not sure why. If the moon has such a powerful effect on the tides, why shouldn’t it equally have an influence over seeds? My favourite Newcastle vegetable garden story concerns the workers, in the mines and in the coal and steel industries. When they went on strike the strikes were notoriously hard to break, the owners and employers despaired. That was because everybody had a good vegetable garden, and kept chooks. And they caught fish, lots of good fish about. So going on strike was a kind of holiday, and well fed; the men pottered about mending the chook house or going fishing or doing a bit of painting, and couldn’t be starved back to work as happened in harsher communities. It probably wasn’t as idyllic as it can be made to sound, but it’s true about the strikes. There is one vegetable that you never need to plant and that is the choko. We never grew them but people were always giving them to us. Everybody tried to give their chokoes away to other people, as though that would satisfy their sense of thrift, because nobody ever liked eating them. I do not know of a vegetable more universally detested. My mother did her best with white sauce and pepper but they were horrible. You could also mash them with butter and pepper but you still had to hold your breath while eating them. People tried mixing them up with sugar and nutmeg and apple in pie fillings but they could not be disguised and it was a waste of good apple. I do not know of anybody who has ever admitted to liking the taste of them; it is


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something that scars you for life. Only one way are they palatable, and that is in pickle: choko pickles are very good. But not exactly the staple diet that a prolific choko vine could provide. I wonder what has happened to all the chokoes these days; it used to seem that you couldn’t kill them with a flame thrower. I think it is that people are less conscientious about making the most of free vegetables.

* Vegetable gardens have their histories, and their fashions. There are matters of contingency, and of necessity. And of class. Of nationality. One historical question mark hangs over the near-miss of the French explorers in the Pacific: had they got here that little bit sooner, would we have been a peasant society of self-sufficient smallholders, or would distance still have exerted its tyranny? A lot of English writers of the nineteenth century hated the industrial revolution and the way it had destroyed their vision of an old England of industrious peasant farmers in homely cottages, growing vegetables and honey, keeping a pig and a cow and chickens, making ale, spinning wool on rose-wreathed doorsteps, the Merrie England that was always more a matter of nostalgia than fact. The new ways enslaved workers to Dickens’s ‘melancholy mad elephant’ of the industrial revolution and destroyed the fibre and fabric of society. Wordsworth, Southey and Blake lamented the loss of innocence and sought sites for possible Utopias. Australia looked like a good place to recreate that Golden Age irretrievably lost in England. So, for instance, Coleridge, Cobbett, John Bright, Bulwer Lytton (who looked to restore a quasi-medieval society down under), Disraeli as well as Dickens thought they could find the past in Australia, and encouraged people to emigrate; Dickens of course sent a number of his characters here. Though none of these advocates actually wanted to come themselves, not to stay. Henry Kingsley in Geoffry Hamlyn wrote the archetypal account of success in


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the colonies (‘there was money in the bank, claret in the cellar, racehorses in the paddock’), an account which is the reverse of his own experience, and whose happy ending demanded a triumphant return to riches in the old country. But of course Australia was no pastoral idyll plucked from the slopes of Mount Olympus, Australia itself was a product of the industrial revolution, raised on mutton, white sugar, white flour, and tea. And its climate was never going to make it easy for anyone to recreate Arcady in the antipodes. Nevertheless, vegetable gardening wasn’t unknown. Itinerant workers were going to be stuck with industrial rations, but settlers did their best to make kitchen gardens. From the first settlement, which Michael Symons in One Continuous Picnic describes as ‘brutal and ill-fed, bestial and despairingly alcoholic, a lonely and not terribly successful prison-farm’, there were gardeners. Within three days of the First Fleet’s arrival the convicts began planting vegetables. The first clergyman, Richard Johnson, planted a garden round his cottage near today’s Bridge Street. By August 1790 his orange pips had grown into little trees two feet tall, his peas were flourishing, he’d cut two crops of wheat, barley, oats and Indian corn, had harvested potatoes, and at least a thousand cucumbers, among other vegetables. He was looking forward to drinking his own wine. Yet the smallholder, the thrifty self-sufficient peasant farmer, has never been a successful feature of Australian life, less out of necessity than policy, it seems. There was a flourishing community on the Hawkesbury in the first part of the nineteenth century, known as the Dungaree farmers because they all dressed ‘in that blue Indian manufacture of cotton’. Alexander Harris describes their crops as he saw them in 1830, near Richmond: [There were] excellent figs, gooseberries, currants, lettuces, oranges, melons, peaches as large as a good-sized


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breakfast cup and of the most exquisite flavour; potatoes, pumpkins as big as a large bucket, cabbages, radishes, onions, beans, pease; in short, everything of the kind profusely produced and of the most superior quality. In one place I saw a whole cart-load of the most delicious peaches going along the road, and on asking the driver where he was taking them to market, he said they were for the pigs, and that all the season through they gathered a similar load every other day from under the trees in the orchard for the same purpose. In 1845 a French visitor called Delessert remarked on the great quantity of European and tropical fruits fed to the pigs, and wondered why they weren’t made into eau de vie and cider. You can’t help feeling the pork from such pigs must have been delicious. Contemporary descriptions of the households of the Dungaree farmers dwell on their peaceful plenty, the pieces of pork and beef hanging in the chimney, along with bags of seeds, the carefully prepared food, a lot of it pumpkin, but deliciously cooked, with leavened bread, and marvellous watermelons. Everywhere else in the colony men outnumbered women, but not in the Hawkesbury. Ralph Rashleigh in the eponymous novel of the period was impressed by the women, and their habit of dressing as men, presumably for safety— and maybe comfort at work? The produce was driven twice weekly along the Great Western Road to the Sydney market, the carts laden with grain, hay, vegetables, fowls, fruit, by the farmers or their convict labourers. And yet, these idyllic pictures are not the only version of the lives of these people. Other writers describe them as slovenly, debauched and drunken. The facts seem to be that monopolies, like the rum trade, and the large farming interests, made sure that they did not


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finally prosper. They were paid in rum, not given the full value of their crops, not allowed to run livestock, and were eventually driven to bankruptcy. As usual, agribusiness triumphed. Small, prosperous farmers, independent in mind and body, were too much of a political threat. For a second time we miss out on being a colony of peasants. But grand houses made sure they grew good food. I hear that one such, in Canberra, become a museum of colonial life, has a historical vegetable garden. This is Lanyon, acquired originally to house Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings, now much more sensibly kept in a purpose-built gallery in the grounds, and the house given over to the kind of furniture that might have graced it in its various palmy days. So I go in search of Lanyon’s gardener. The house will be unwittingly familiar to viewers of various historical television dramas, since it is most gorgeously archetypal and in great demand. I believe Seven Little Australians filmed its outside scenes there. You walk under a dense tunnel of wisteria and up some steps on to a deep wide veranda that swoops down low over the house and is lined with painted wooden boards, and already you feel the marvellous coolness that this imparts to its dim high-ceilinged rooms. One of them now a shop, where you pay your entrance fee and can buy souvenirs. Yes, the gardener will be happy to talk to us, if we can find him. So we go out from this darkness and coolness into the eye-striking brilliance of the summer day outside. It’s 38 degrees. The yellow paddocks stretch undulating to the gentle hills, fortunately obscuring the suburb that is hardly more than a stone’s throw away, and throwing stones is what you feel like. Along with a lot of other people I signed a petition to stop the city’s swarming outskirts encroaching so near, but it was unsuccessful. There are occasional trees, and cows lying about, and the swish of sprinklers. The hedged garden spreads down a slight slope of gentle terraces towards the north; the summers here may be baking hot but the winters can be long, bleak and frosty.


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Fortunately when we find Graham Williams the gardener it is under the vast shade of a row of conifers, and he is happy to talk to us. The garden is historical, but not colonial, it dates from 1941. This, Graham reckons, is a time neglected in Australian gardening history, and ought not to be. It was made by Paul Sorensen, who also planted the orchards, and the pines and oaks; the owner at that time was Tom Fields, a butcher from Sydney, who spent some time in the house but didn’t ever live there. Sorensen, according to Judith Baskin in Australia’s Timeless Gardens, is as important a figure in Australian horticulture as Edna Walling, and continues to influence gardens today although he did not write any books. He came to Australia from Denmark in 1915, a year of bad drought, and had to take work as a general hand. His experience of dust and drought made him say: ‘Don’t buy land, buy water’. Baskin says ‘Sorensen was influenced not by Robinson and Jekyll [as was Walling], but by a European interpretation of Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton through his own teachers and first employers in Copenhagen. He was interested in spaces and large plants. Trees were the most significant element in his design. In his gardens, the mature effects are the lovely contrast of foliage of all types offset by wide lawns.’ This is certainly true of Lanyon. In making the gardens Sorensen would have had help from the people on the property, which was a working property until resumed as part of the sprawl of Canberra, and from Italian prisoners of war. So it is what Graham calls a fairly modern vegetable patch. He tries to keep it in period. He grows mainly heirlooms, a lot of old pumpkins, Hubbard and black and green-warted squash, pink banana squash, and blue. He is part of a process that keeps things going, through seeds passed down through the generations. Especially the Italians are good at this, apparently. He grows a lot of winter vegetables, as well as summer ones, but doesn’t try to store them as people would have in


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the old days, when they had better storage methods. He likes the winter best. So what is growing? Onions, carrots, leeks. Spinach, cabbage, garlic. Sweet corn. All the pumpkins. Capsicums. Rhubarb. Tomatoes. Redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries. Silver beet, rainbow chard. Artichokes, Jerusalem and globe. At this time of year like everyone else he suffers from big zucchini problem. Peas, snow peas, beans, scarlet runners which he doesn’t care to eat but whose flowers he likes. Ditto the cardoons, huge spectacular purple thistle-artichoked flowers on long grey stems, which are what you eat, after you’ve bunched, tied and blanched them; we see that he enjoys them as a talking point in the garden. He’s just got some new rhubarb crowns because visitors complained that the old ones weren’t red enough, so he’s bought the reddest he can find, but has kept the old delicious pink ones as well. So far this garden bears a certain resemblance to my ideal potager. The square beds are surrounded and separated by hedges made of herbs: sage, lemon balm, salad burnet, planted in straight lines. They are there as herbs, but also to stop people walking on the beds. He tries not to mulch too much but he does use some lucerne because he’s the only gardener, doing the work that required five men in the old days, along with the help of grooms and boys from time to time. In those days they didn’t mulch, they cultivated all the time to keep the weeds away. People ask him why he doesn’t get the apprentices to do the weeding, but that’s the last thing he’d do, he’d lose all the precious seedlings that way. He also uses manure, especially from the bulls in the paddock, whose giant pats he collects in winter. Green crops like broad beans he ploughs in when they are finished, and then plants corn. He uses his own compost, no chemicals. The spare produce and plants he sells, and uses the money they earn to buy seeds—another kind of composting, he laughs, putting back in what you take out. It’s all a matter of balance. And of course this is the traditional lore


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of gardeners; people have always known this, but so many of us have forgotten, and need to have it recalled for us. The most important thing in the garden is the hedges, Graham says. Especially the hawthorn—yes, he knows it is classed as a weed and you probably can’t even get it any more, but here it does an essential job. It is full of wrens and silvereyes, tiny birds that nest in the hedges then come straight out and eat the aphids, the white butterflies, all the insects that prey on plants. Native shrubbery would work okay too, anything with honeyed flowers, where the little birds can get away from the big birds, and the thornier the better, the big birds can’t get in, the little ones are safe. I think I’ll have to demolish the rosy-apricot brick wall of my mind’s eye garden and plant honey-flowered hedges instead. When the cats came they upset the balance. You have to train them not to eat birds, he says. Last year there was a black snake living there. On the apricot lawn. Graham trod on him a couple of times. He got too friendly, you could just about pat him. It was because of the drought, no feed in the paddocks. The leaves were blowing off the trees, they’d given up. The yellow of this summer is still healthy, not dry and dead like last year. There was no food for the mice, they came into the garden, the snakes followed. At least the cats keep the mice down, and thus the snakes away. The fruit trees don’t do too well, too frosty. This year the late frost that ruined a lot of the wine grapes in the region destroyed the apricot crop, and even the plums didn’t survive. We agree that apricots are the one fruit that don’t ever seem to come right commercially, but there’s really no point in growing them here. And the apples all get clobbered by the cockatoos. Graham propagates his own vegetables, he doesn’t buy any seedlings; I’m interested in how this theme of the importance of seeds rather than seedlings is emerging as I consider the nature of vegetable gardening. He lets things go to seed so he doesn’t lose them, so we don’t lose them. He


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belongs to Seedsavers, a society of people who maintain and collect and protect seeds, so species aren’t lost, but he doesn’t see himself as an antiquarian gardener, though he likes to keep the forties nature of his garden. He doesn’t go in for super-hybrid stuff, he likes species, the things that mature at different times, like the old-fashioned and unusual pumpkins. That’s why he’s interested in the forties; there was a lot of horticulture going on during the war, with people swapping seeds; now they just go to the supermarket and buy things in plastic wrap. Above all he is aware that vegetable gardening is about food. Who’s picking the redcurrants, we ask him. The birds, he says. Anyone who wants them. You, if you like. He turns off the sprinkler so we can; the sun beats down on us, but there is a certain coolness among the wet currant bushes. I take home a small bag, 400 grams it turns out, and using the Eliza Acton recipe quoted by Elizabeth David I make redcurrant jelly: the same weight in sugar, brought to the boil for eight minutes, constantly stirred and skimmed, then strained through a sieve lined with butter muslin. Two tiny pots of fragrant ruby red jelly are the result. That night on the television one of the Two Fat Ladies presses redcurrants into mascarpone cream on a fruit tart: the most beautiful of fruits, she says. The names of vegetables and fruits make wonderful lists. The words are like a mantra, like a chant, like a spell to ward off evil. And so they do, when the words become flesh. The prose of vegetable gardeners seems to be lucid, simple, valuing of clarity. I find a book that I bought in France, once, called Le Jardin Familial, telling me how to make a vegetable garden. It was first published in 1941, that same wartime year which saw the making of the potager at Lanyon. I can read it easily, even though I don’t know much of the vocabulary, because the syntax is so pure and elegant, and the words I can guess, most of them, anyway. Were I to garden with the strictness, the thoroughness and effort it recommends ...


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I’d need an allotment to do it on, to get away from my oak trees. This is what it advises its readers to obtain, if they live in an apartment or can’t otherwise manage the space. Unless of course they have a house in the country for holiday gardening. The book tells me how to apply to the appropriate municipal authorities, who can, out of objectives purely social and philanthropic, arrange for me to hire or acquire my allotment. The book tells me how much time I will have to spend and how large an area I will need to feed however many people I wish to grow my vegetables for. Of course, it says, rather sniffily, if all I want is ornamental shrubs or lawn I can have a much bigger area for far less time. And I am back in Europe, in 1997, Graham and I are on a train going from Paris to Vienna, crossing France, and a little of Germany, into Austria, and all the way along I am charmed by the allotments we pass. Perhaps they are beside the railway line because this is where the land is flat and suitable for gardens. All my life I have loved looking out of trains into people’s backyards, spying on the private lives in them, ever since as I child I used to go to Sydney, the magic metropolis a hundred miles down the track from Newcastle. It is the end of a golden summer in Europe, and there are all these little plots, some indeed consisting of ornamental shrubs and lawns, but most with ordered rows of vegetables, lettuces, asparagus trenched, a fruit tree or two, espaliered maybe, a vine, tomatoes staked, all beautifully cultivated, simply shining with the love that has gone into their making. And in nearly every case there are the necessities of leisure: a table and chairs, an umbrella, or one of those pavilion-like awnings to keep the sun out, for trees are not popular on allotments, people want the sun to ripen their crops. Perhaps a hammock, a barbecue. Nearby will be a small town, or a large one, with huddles of ugly weeping-concrete apartment buildings, but here in the surrounding country are these burnished little plots, whose purpose seems as much spiritual as economic.

*


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Michael Symons in One Continuous Picnic quotes nursery catalogues from nineteenth-century plant nurseries, ‘surprisingly large’ catalogues; one offers 70 varieties of apple trees, another 71 dessert apple trees and 80 kinds of pear, mostly with French names, another has 70 varieties of gooseberry. He’s writing in 1982 and deploring the enormous falling-off in these numbers; of the 71 apples mentioned, only two are still current. I was thinking that things had improved a little since then; we can now get a number of old-fashioned apples, for instance from the market gardens at Pialligo, in Canberra, and there are varieties of potatoes and lettuce that weren’t available only a few years ago. But when I looked at the newsletter put out by the Digger’s Club for spring 1998 I realised that ought to be seen as small comfort. Its cover has a note on biodiversity: Biological diversity is responsible for the maintenance of the world as we know it. The gene pool is a real treasure. This living treasure of seeds comprises billions of years of evolution and at least 12,000 years of human selection for agriculture. From a biological viewpoint, genetic diversity is as essential to life as food, air and water. Today our society relies on only 150 out of a possible 80,000 food plants. Since 1900, of the variety of food plants that our grandparents ate, only 3% are still available today. The loss of genetic diversity in the food supply directly impedes the safety of crops, because their ability to resist blights, pests and disease depends on variation. When one plant species becomes extinct, so too will the 20–40 animal and insect species that rely on it. Gardeners are emerging as principal biological heroes in the struggle of the era to maintain the biological diversity that sustains life on the planet.


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When Graham Williams at Lanyon talked about growing heirlooms I thought he was using the word in its general sense, of something old and valuable that has been passed down from previous generations, and of course the word does have that meaning here too but in the context of seeds it has a quite specific significance. The Digger’s Seed Annual for 1998 (a catalogue and seed sowers manual) has this to say about heirlooms: Heirlooms are garden varieties preserved by generations of gardeners because they meet their needs of superior flavour and long harvest. Commercial varieties are bred for shelf life and all-at-once machine harvest, so 95% are inferior varieties for back-yard gardeners. Heirlooms are open-pollinated and seed can be saved, but hybrids are the device where companies pirate genetic resources for profit. We all know what the square tomato, mercifully so far with us only as a dreadful warning, stands for: package, storage, cartage and long shelf-life. The tomatoness of the tomato, what makes us as eaters interested in it, its scent, flavour, texture, are nowhere on this list. Now we are being promised genetic engineering and all its unknown and potentially dangerous consequences to solve the problems we wouldn’t have if biodiversity were practised. Digger’s claim their mixed packets of seeds are the best insurance against pests and disease. Single, genetically homogeneous varieties are susceptible to attack, so chemical spraying is necessary. A mixture of cultivars would solve these problems—now, and in the past: the Irish potato famine, for instance. Their catalogue has more marvellous lists. You can see in the names people give their vegetables what love is involved in their labour. What joy. Lazy Housewife, Blue Lake, Painted Lady, Purple King, Scarlet Runner, all beans, beans whose history can be traced back to 6000 BC


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in Peru. Beefsteak, Tigeralia, Principe Borghese, Amish Pasta, Black Russian, Green Zebra, Rouge de Marmande (Graham Williams told me scornfully that the tomato promoted under the name of a certain famous commercial television gardener is nothing more than a Rouge de Marmande, which has been around for much longer than he has), Grosse Lisse, Mortgage Lifter, Shimeig Creg—named by its breeder in honour of his father, the last man to speak the Manx language; tomatoes for stuffing, for drying, for bottling, for slicing, or just for eating, tomatoes round, pointed, small, very big. There are golden beetroot and ruby Brussels sprouts and chocolate capsicums, these not fanciful names, simply descriptive. When I was a child we had a certain variety of vegetables, in the sense of different kinds of tomato or lettuce, but there weren’t a great many; meals of meat and three veg were mostly the same three veg, beans peas potatoes, or peas carrots potatoes. Never not potatoes. The repertoire began to enlarge in the fifties, with mainly Italian influences. I remember coming back from France in 1971 and trying to buy fennel; nobody knew the name, but when I said it’s a bit like celery but round and has a slightly aniseed taste, I was sometimes lucky. And now there’s a whole lot of Asian vegetables to take into account: lemongrass, Kaffir lime, pak choy, wom buk, mizuna, misuba, daikon, and all the variety of mints. Yet it seems we are still only eating 3 per cent of the variety of food plants available to our grandparents.

* Vegetables are inclined to make proselytisers of people. I’ve written elsewhere in this book about the nineteenth-century physician Philip Muskett who had strong views about improving life in Australia. He’s so interesting I’ve given him a whole chapter to himself, named after one of his preoccupations, ‘Keeping him out of the pub’. One was growing a lot of wine, and for export, so that quite a lot of people lived


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in the country, led a prosperous outdoor life, and everyone took a healthful glass or two with meals instead of getting drunk swilling beer and spirits in public houses. For the same reason he thought that girls should be taught to cook, so that their husbands would stay home enjoying the fruits of domesticity instead of getting drunk in the pub. It only took a hundred years for this idea to catch on. He also believed in airy bedrooms and long walks and eating vegetables. He was quite properly shocked at the enormous amounts of meat eaten, and three times a day in many cases. And he offers more of those seductive lists of vegetables that will lead to well-being, beginning with Milton’s supper (the Paradise Lost Milton): olives, with bread and butter. He then goes on to recommend globe artichokes and Jerusalem (I hope everybody knows they are called Jerusalem as a corruption of girasole, meaning turning towards the sun; that is, they are a kind of sunflower), aubergine, celeriac (‘it might be cultivated with benefit, mingled with gratitude’), cardoons, asparagus, salsify or vegetable oyster, served cold and boiled with herbs and vinaigrette, and all the Scorzonera. Sweet corn. Brussels sprouts. And sea kale, the most delicate of all. And all should be interestingly cooked. He suggests that Australia’s national dish not be tea or damper but a macédoine of vegetables, a vegetable curry, or a salad. It is in salads that his true affection lies, and salads that we should all be eating copiously, and of course growing. They are the sea-breeze of the table, and have an exhilarating effect on the nervous system. He recommends lamb’s lettuce, or mâche, and rocket, says we are okay for celery, cucumber and radishes, but unfortunately do not grow any of the cresses, mustard, or garden or water—the latter is to be had from John Chinaman. He deplores the absence of salad herbs, there’s no ravigote, that is, a mixture of burnet, chervil, chives and tarragon (he reckons the verb ravigoter means to cheer or strengthen and so it does, to revive, to refresh, to buck up, says Harrap’s dictionary, and tells us that


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tarragon is the herb dragon) and a little parsley. The salad leaves should be washed and dried, never shredded as is the case with English salad, or left soaking in water, which doesn’t anyway get rid of the bugs. The dressing should be the best oil—he recommends Crosse and Blackwell’s olive—with equally good vinegar, and he gives a fine recipe for mayonnaise. And of course there is garlic. ‘One needs a certain amount of fortitude and resolution to mention garlic before an Australian audience ... nevertheless, the ordeal has to be faced, and I shall endeavour to appear outwardly calm; though inwardly I assure you I am positively quivering ...’ He then spends some pages telling us how important and delicious garlic is, provided we use it sensitively. He is critical of Australian market gardening, which seems to involve only the potato and the cabbage, and thinks that people should easily be able to grow their own salads and herbs. At least we should ask more of our greengrocers. He isn’t vegetarian, he just thinks we should eat more vegetables and fish, and drink wine in the interests of sobriety. Our latitudes here are similar to Mediterranean countries, yet we eat ten times as much meat as the Italians. If we had as many good greengrocers as there are butchers, we would be much happier. I think Muskett would have been horrified at just how long it took for us to adopt his recommendations. That we still haven’t, entirely, though the message at least receives official promotion.

* I am taking great pleasure in this gardening but it is very much verbal and vicarious. What about the people who are actually doing it? Collecting seeds, swapping them, buying them from Digger’s or the local supermarket. Telling us that there is nothing to beat a sunwarmed tomato straight from your own garden. And going to the dump to find old windows to make cold frames so that they can enter


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the great unofficial Canberra competition to produce a ripe tomato before Christmas. We believe them about the beauty of the tomato but just how numerous are these practitioners? How much is lip-service to an ideal of flavour that few of us are prepared to work for? In a book called Town Life in Australia Richard Twopenny claimed that ‘vegetables are for the most part despised, though the thoroughly old English dish of greens remains in favour, and potatoes are largely eaten.’ But he didn’t think much of Australians as cultivators of the earth. ‘The love of gardening was not at all common—it is not a sufficiently exciting occupation.’ I wondered if this was still true, a century later. I took an investigative walk through a nearby suburb, along a bike track which runs between the back fences of houses and what you can call Sullivan’s Creek or the drain (it has been concreted) depending on how grand you want to be, and peered through the palings to see if there was any vegetable cultivation. There wasn’t much, some fine big tomatoes, a few lettuces, some stands of corn; plenty of signs of the garden as a place of recreation but nothing much to subsist on. But Nancy, who lives on the upper rim of my suburb, with her garden giving on to the slopes of Mount Majura, tells me her neighbours on either side have wonderful vegetable gardens, and have expanded on to the reserve beyond their fences, turning the slopes of the mountain into their own little allotments. One family is Greek, the other Italian. It is the Italians who have also built a brick oven in their backyard, and occasionally give her wonderful wood-fired bread. What about written evidence? I found a pamphlet published by the Bureau of Statistics in 1994 giving the results of a survey of home production of selected foodstuffs. It includes fruit, nuts, vegetables, as well as poultry slaughtered, eggs gathered, beer brewed, wine made, and fish caught. The total home-grown fruit crop was 110,000 tonnes, compared with 2,554,000 tonnes in the agricultural census. Vegetables


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totalled 153,000 tonnes, compared with 2,752,000 tonnes, A curiously high proportion was the recreational fishing catch; 31,000 tonnes compared with the professional catch of 221,000. The survey did a breakdown by states, discovering that Queensland produced more fruit, eggs and beer and caught more seafood than any other state, Victoria produced the most vegetables, poultry and wine, while South Australia grew more nuts. The most plentiful homegrown vegetable was tomatoes, accounting for 18.2 per cent of total home garden vegetable production with a crop of 28,000 tonnes. Next most common were pumpkins, cabbages and Brussels sprouts, lettuces and potatoes. In a year the average productive backyard grew 70.4 kilos of vegetables. Households where the reference person was born in Italy produced 2.4 million litres of wine, accounting for 61 per cent of the total home-made vintage. Wine-making households averaged 1.6 litres a week, so they weren’t going to be able to get too drunk on the results. I was rather horrified to see that choko production was 1969.7 tonnes, with figures for all states except the Northern Territory, which presumably means they don’t grow any. Finally, age. Households where the reference person was in the age group 55–69 produced most fruit, vegetables, nuts and wine, but where that person was in the age group 35–44 more eggs, beer, poultry slaughtered and seafood were reported. What all this means I am not sure, but it is interesting to contemplate. I did some sums of my own, and worked out that home grown fruit production equalled 23 per cent of commercial, while the figures for vegetables were 18 per cent. So you could say that in 1992 quite a reasonable proportion of food was being grown by people for their own use. On the other hand, averages and such are quite untrustworthy (and much of the pamphlet reads as a justification of its sampling methods), and what is probably happening is that some people are


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growing a huge amount and others very little. Some people are keeping their neighbours in fresh vegies while others have a tomato plant in a pot.

* I remarked earlier that growing vegetables belongs to the time after the Fall. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had no need to grow food. Everything was there, they just wandered and picked. Until they picked the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and learned that food needs to be worked for. It has been possible to see the Aborigines as living in a kind of prelapsarian state, wandering and picking. Early settlers reported, often enviously, how little time they needed to spend to garner their food. ‘To them it was a real pleasure ... they were so light-hearted and gay, nothing troubled them,’ said Tom Petrie of the Bunya nut feast he went to in the nineteenth century; as a 15-year-old he travelled 160 kilometres from Brisbane with 100 Aborigines. They understood the wild garden they lived in, and just how bounteous it was, they knew when the seasons would provide, and where, their diet was often luxurious, generally varied, usually delicious, and mostly sufficient. More recently it has been suggested that they did manipulate their environment, in a broad sense by using fire, but in a gardening sense also, replanting parts of the tubers that they harvested and sowing the seeds of wattles and other food plants along the trails of their wanderings. The fact is that white settlement destroyed this possibly paradisical existence, and we can no longer do more than guess at what it was like. And we certainly can’t recreate it. We can no more return the Aboriginal people to that pre-European state than we can find our way back to the Garden of Eden. For us food gardens will always mean work, and those of us who make them have learned to enjoy the labour they demand.


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The taste of memory

There’s a saying I can’t get out of my head. I don’t care for it much, and don’t really agree with it, but there it stays. It’s supposed to be the words of Lin Yutang, a Chinese sage, and I think I got it out of a novel by Erica Jong. Sometimes I wonder if it is one of those invented wise saws, not much above the kind of joke that was around in my youth: whenever somebody wanted to say something sententious, they’d preface it with Confucius he say ... This saying is: Patriotism is the memory of food eaten in childhood. Leave alone the fact that patriotism is a difficult word for people of my generation because of our sense of the various crimes which have been committed in its name, I am not sure what the foods of childhood mean to someone like me, child of different generations of migrants from England, who like so many of this heritage have completely reinvented themselves so far as food is concerned. Were I to go all patriotic about food it would most likely be about things I never ate in my childhood, garlic, olive oil, rare roast lamb. I might recollect my father’s broad beans, and his tomatoes, the mignonette lettuces and the tiny number of strawberries counted out: one for you, one for you. The other day at the Windsor in Melbourne I ate a petit four and realised it was a miniature version of the raspberry jam and coconut slice my mother used to make. A fleeting moment of taste and I was back with a childhood treat.


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But this is memory, not patriotism, and quite possibly it is a true Chinese saying, for a millennia-old civilisation would continue to remember and celebrate itself in its food, as we can see at the lower end of the chain, the country town Chinese restaurants which however Australianised pay lip service to an ancient culture. Memory is different, it is private and individual and possibly eccentric. You don’t have to have read Proust’s massive novel about the remembrance of things past, or the search for lost time, depending on how you translate it, to know the significance of the madeleine. His aunt broke off a little piece of cake, put it in a spoon and dipped it into a cup of lime tea. When it was nicely soaked in the dry faded-flowery tea she fed it to him. She did this when Proust was a small boy, and when he repeated the action, later, in adulthood, the memories of his childhood came flooding back, triggered by the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea in a way they never could have been by intellectual means. Tastes and smells transport us, they carry our minds back, we do not so much remember their moments as relive them. I think this is why this moment of the book is so famous, for everybody is capable of such a revisiting. That was the effect of my tiny cake at the Windsor, though if you had asked me for a childhood food memory I never would have dredged up that one. Madeleines won’t be repositories of memory for most of us, but they are excellent little delicacies, not too sweet which I like, and quite easy to make. One day we were having some people for a drink late Sunday morning and I served them with sparkling wine. They are little oval shell-shaped cakes, dry and delicious, and you really should make them in the right sort of mould which is bizarrely expensive but they are not madeleines without this ribbed shape, though they will taste okay. There are various stories as to why they have this particular girl’s name: a baker’s beautiful daughter, the fallen but forgiven and finally sainted Mary of the Bible, but nobody really knows. The shape is


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T h e t a s t e o f m e m o r y | 193

certainly old: the shell-shaped moulds have been found in the ruins of Pompeii. And I have just recently read that since Proust’s Illiers, or Combray as he called it, is on the pilgrimage route to Santiago di Compostela, the cakes were sold as a kind of souvenir—literally, to help remember—to the pilgrims whose emblem was a cockle shell; I wish I’d known that when I wrote my book about going but not getting to Compostela.

M a d el e i n e s | These are flavoured with lemon and vanilla. Melt 125 grams of butter and allow to cool Beat 2 eggs and 1⁄2 cup caster sugar until thick and light Add 1⁄2 teaspoon grated lemon rind, I tablespoon lemon juice and 1 teaspoon vanilla essence Fold through 3⁄4 cup plain flour Add melted butter and stir gently Brush the madeleine moulds thickly with melted butter and spoon in enough batter to 3⁄4 fill each mould Bake at 200°C for 8–10 minutes. The cakes will turn golden and they will sort of float in the melted butter in the mould. Remove from oven and loosen with a spatula. They are good served warm—and you can see they are quite simple to make. I was once asked to talk about what would constitute my own madeleine of memory and of course I couldn’t think of any food that seemed at all interesting but then I did come up with an important scent: gas. When I was a child Newcastle was greatly subject to blackouts which always happened just as the evening meal was being cooked. My mother had a couple of primus stoves that you had to pump, she didn’t like them, thought they were dangerous, so my parents


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bought a small gas stove to sit on a bench. The rather nasty stench of coal gas triggers this memory of childhood and difficulty and a certain cosiness sitting round the oil lamp at our books, but it is not that I am smelling mentally now, it is the gentler odour of natural gas. Sometimes I will be stirring some garlic and onions and perhaps some meat in a pan on my stove—today it was Lucy cooking leek and potato soup—and there will come a sudden waft of it, almost like a shaft of light, and I will be back in France, in a large but primitive kitchen in the big house in Lozère, with its blue and white tiled floor and shabby porcelain sink, its casement window looking out on to the expanse of the back garden, fastened shut in the clever way of such windows so there is a slit to let the air in, and there is a little moment of happy family, the children in the dining room doing their homework, Graham and James wrestling with the maths, anybody who came for dinner was enlisted to the cause of the maths homework and nobody ever really got the hang of it. Graham didn’t help him with his French, James all by himself could come top of the class in French but the maths defeated everybody, even Graham with third-year university maths could never quite get it and no one felt any shame at trying because they always failed. It seemed funny because maths is supposed to be a universal language of numbers but in early high school in the Paris suburbs it wasn’t. The table with its red-checked cloth over layers of oilcloth and blanket to protect the surface, the ornate silver cutlery, the red wine in tumblers, no television, but a small series of delicious things from the market and the day’s doings to discuss. Just that oblique little waft of gas plus some savoury food, and there I am, the baguette from the baker dropping crumbs, the dimly lamplit room, the washing up done in a basin in the porcelain sink with water boiled on the stove, for although the kitchen was directly below the bathroom which did have hot water on tap, and when you emptied the bath you could hear the water running down just there in a pipe against the wall, there was


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none in the kitchen. Sometimes I would send a child up with a large enamel jug to get some, but it always sloshed a bit, and then I had to polish the wooden stairs, rubbing them with a cloth dipped in wax. By hand; the floors you did with the immemorial floor-polishing dance of good French housewives, a large rough cloth, the wax, and your feet lifting and sliding, lifting and sliding, rubbing the wax in, polishing it off. Light-footed and fast, that was the way to dance a good shine on. Oh, I could go on. Not so lengthily as Proust, perhaps, though given time, maybe. It was a marvellous house, the Lozère house, twenty-five minutes from the centre of Paris by train, a large square building with attics and cellars, a small manor house in fact, ivy-covered, with a big garden with espaliered fruit trees and a copse of hazelnuts, on the corner of two streets, rue Théodore de Banville and rue Théophile Gautier, named after poets, which seemed a bit too good to be true, considering it belonged to a professor of French and we always wondered if that was why he bought it. With a polished and carved armoire that has turned up in various fictions of mine, and some handsome nineteenth-century furniture and a once-good piano, an Erard, that had suffered in the bombing of Rouen. We offered to go halves in having it tuned so the kids could play it but it was still a bit wonky, I think the bombing damage was irrevocable. Along with the armoire and the furniture it was part of the dowry of the lady of the house, she was that, a lady, a grande bourgeoise. All the sheets and the tea towels were wedding linen with little red initials embroidered on them, the kind you can get in antique shops now. This was mostly a summer house for its owners, it was wonderful with all the casement windows open to the mild air of the valley, which though it was part of the Paris suburbs still was a village, but we were mostly there in the winter. Our landlords gave us the house at a reasonable rent, a sort of friend’s price, in return for our looking after it, being careful with the books, not using the heirloom china, that sort of thing.


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They’d been in Canberra and I’d invited them for dinner along with some other distinguished academics—I remember one conversation was about what books one read in the loo: Hobbes’ Leviathan was one of them, another was a Greek grammar—and I remember the meal as an example of the sort of dinner party I have so thoroughly given up. First course was a stack of pancakes with two different fillings, thick sauces, one based on ham and cheese, delicate and creamy, the other on mushrooms, with garlic and green herbs, more robust, with a third quite runny to pour over it. I had spent some days making this in bits and pieces. I’m not sure what the main course was, maybe a rather marvellous dish of Pomiane’s of a piece of beef cut like the pages of a book with a filling stuffed in it which seems a lot of rich fillings so maybe it wasn’t that. There would have been a salad, and cheese. The dessert I know was a lemon and an orange sorbet filled into halves of the fruits, which I’d collected over a period of time and kept in the freezer. I served them on a large old oval plate covered in dark green shining bay leaves and they did look quite gorgeous. Anyway our guests offered their French house alternately with the Cambridge one to us for Graham’s next sabbatical. They asked a very reasonable rent for so much space in such an expensive city, and its being somewhat spartan would not have made it worth less money. But by the time we ran the heating it turned out to be expensive and even if you had the furnace roaring away for hours gobbling up oil it was hard to get the temperature much above sixteen degrees. There was a photograph of Lloyd the professor in a tweed jacket and trousers with a thick woollen dressing gown over them and a scarf tucked in his neck, working in his study at a long seventeenth-century refectory table covered in books. I used to sit there and write, it was wonderful, both Graham and I could have piles of books and papers and there was always room for the present work. I got some good writing done in that study. I didn’t have a real job as I did at home and so I had time.


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One of my favourite stories, ‘The Ego in Arcadia’, comes out of that house, with its old warped glass windows. The kids went to the local school and then when we rented the house on a later occasion they went to the high school at Orsay, the next suburb, which has a fine university. I organised for them to eat school lunch so I did not have to be the good housewife staying at home to cook them a midday meal. It cost as much for one day as it had in England for a week, but it was more than worth it. Usually three small courses, a carrot salad, say, or beetroot, or pâté, maybe a little steak with sautéed potato, or some chicken, or pork, or turkey, some yoghurt or cheese or fruit, or a tart. They’d come home full of beans and tell me what they had done and what they had eaten, but they can still shudder at the memory of English school dinners. The very worst seems to have been liver with mashed watery lumpy swede turnip, though mushy peas and instant potato rated pretty horrid. The children loved it in that house. They had good friends, and went to their houses and invited them home. Sometimes, when they were older, there was a boom, which was a party. They loved sleeping in the attic, and used to play marvellous games. They would put on plays and invite adults, selling us our good Spanish sherry for five centimes a glass. After Graham died, and I sold our Citroën, which we had bought on arriving in Paris at the very end of 1976 and driven it brand gleaming new to Lozère—and when James aged seven got out he discovered that he had had a biro in his pocket that had leaked on to the cream leather seat, and we are all agreed that that is probably the absolutely worst moment of his life, and how his father did not flay him with words is a marvel, except we think it was so dreadful that it was beyond any reproach but a strangled silence, and Graham did in fact get the biro off by some miraculous means, but James still remembers the horror of it—I said that I would use the money to take us all back to France for


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a pious visit to our old haunts. I hired a car and James mostly drove, we went and looked at the house in Lozère, it was June and gorgeous early summer, all the trees youthful green and everything burgeoning. It appeared to be permanently inhabited now, the people who rented it to us are dead and we did wonder if their children would keep it but it seemed to have a French family in it. We stood for a while just looking at it, sadly, because there was the past and it was gone and all those people we once were had gone too, but happily as well, for the memory of old happy times that were still alive in it. Then we drove slowly down to Séverac, but there you cook with electricity and its memories are held in quite different odours. On Christmas day in 1976 Lucy got an ABBA tape and I even have fond memories of that because it was Christmas and winter and immensely exciting, we jumped in the Citroën on the spur of the moment after we’d opened our presents and drove to Chartres, we walked round the outside of the great cathedral and it was very cold and smelt of water and stone, inside it was cold and brilliantly blue, and nearly empty, and came home for Christmas lunch to the house scented with evergreens, which I had put in an ancient copper fish kettle that sat on the hearth. The house had pretty marble fireplaces but nobody had been game to light any fires in a long time. One day I bought a very fine free-range chicken in the market and the woman looked at me and said she would tell me how to cook it. Put it in a cold oven, she said, turn it on to 200 degrees, and baste it. The gas oven at Lozère was one of those that go whomp!, rather small and dingy and the temperature unpredictable, but it did prove an excellent way to cook a succulent chicken. Roast chicken, and gas ... It seems to need that vaporous little lick of heat to convey the memory ... And mussels. I used to buy small black mussels from the Normandy coast, more expensive but much sweeter than the big Dutch mussels, and still an economical meal.


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This is Lucy’s recipe, recreated from those days. She entered it in a competition, which she didn’t win—it was for dinner at Maxim’s in Paris with your favourite partner—though she did get a commendation and it is very good.

L u c y’s M u s s el s w i t h Wh i t e Wi n e | For 4–6 people – 1 to 1.5 kilos mussels (I prefer the smaller and sweeter variety as the larger New Zealand mussels are too chewy and strong for the delicate wine sauce) – 2 medium onions, chopped – 2⁄ 3 tblspns olive oil (I use Italian or Greek) – 2–3 cloves garlic, chopped – 1 tblspn vinegar – 1 to 2 glasses of white wine – Parsley, a good handful, chopped – Pepper, to taste

Method: Clean the mussels, getting rid of the beards and grit, and discarding any open or broken mussel shells. In a large saucepan put the olive oil and onions and cook a little. Add the garlic, and allow to heat, then add the mussels, the white wine, the vinegar, the pepper and the parsley. Cover and allow to simmer, stirring occasionally. Serve when all the mussels are open, discarding any that don’t, and the wine mixture is hot. I like to serve this in shallow soup bowls with Italian bread, and white wine to drink. You can add crème fraîche, or a little cream to the mussels as you add the wine, but I find this unnecessary as the white wine flavour with the mussels is a delight all on its own!

*


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Sometimes, if the light falls in a different way, if the gas carries with it a slightly different smell—and you can never know which it will be, these things are not controllable, that is the whole point of this kind of taste and odour memory, it has to be its own master—then I am in Wagga, visiting my sister and her husband. It’s a long time ago, middling seventies, generally, when they had first gone there and were living in an old house in Docker Street. It had a big high-ceilinged kitchen, too, and they had bought a wonderful new stove, a Canon, with a gas rotisserie. The memory is of winter, leaving Canberra on a Friday afternoon after work, the kids strapped in the back of the car, getting to Wagga in the dark, I suppose at about seven o’clock, and there would be a piece of meat roasting, turning slowly in the hissing blue flames, the meat brown and crusty caramel, Fred basting it, later putting it to rest for a moment, and with skilful respectful fingers carving it. Such welcome, the pleasure of seeing good friends, the delight of the meal to come. I think those arrivals in Wagga, with the promise of a whole weekend to come, are among the happiest times in my life. They don’t live in that house any more, they don’t seem to use the grill so much, they have had children who have grown up, as have mine, we are not those young people full of expectation and wonder about the future that we were then, but just for a moment, in the odour of meat roasting in a gas flame, there we all are, Fred is pouring sherry into little clay cups made by a potter called Dulcie Trudgeon— it was in the days before we began drinking bubbly wine for aperitif—and there is not just meat but Brenda cooking vegetables and some amazing entrée—I remember a soup made of scallops and Jerusalem artichokes that was a wonder—and cheeses and even perhaps dessert, and for a while we are those people, strangers indeed to the selves we are now, again. I still love going to Wagga to visit Brenda and Fred, and the food is


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still wonderful, and maybe when more years have passed some odd unexpected trigger will bring these moments back. We’ve just been; Brenda steamed asparagus, thick crunchy stems whose ends snapped off very sharply, and served it with haloumi cheese cooked in a smudge of hot oil and a sauce made of chopped Kalamata olives, shallots (French ones) garlic, fresh basil, olive oil and lemon juice, on a little pile of rocket. I’ve tried it since with mint, which is a classical accompaniment of haloumi, and that was excellent. And Fred made a dish he had eaten recently in Vietnam, of scallops in a sharpish sauce poured over noodles, simple and luxurious. I don’t need a madeleine-type memory to bring them back, here they are written down.

* The question I would like to know the answer to, is what did we eat for that Christmas dinner in Paris after we had been to Chartres for the morning? That faint evanescent little odour of natural gas is immensely powerful, it unlatches a door and out the memories come tumbling, but only the ones that choose to do so. I can’t remember what we had for that Christmas meal. It would have been a feast, in some way, there would have been some delicacies and of course good wine, and certainly it wasn’t a turkey or a chicken roasted or anything lengthy, we were staying in somebody else’s house with a strange gas oven, we would not have gone away and left anything cooking. Always when we were overseas like that we kept a diary and wrote down everything we spent, newspapers, children’s school lunches, the market expenses, movies, baby-sitting, two tiny turtles and a tank to put them in. Money was tight, we were nervous about over-spending, and keeping a close tally was a way of preventing that. But the diary of that trip begins in January 1977; Christmas 1976 is unrecorded. So I wonder; I imagine, maybe some superb sausages made of seafood? Some turkey breast, which although it was cheap was rare for us?


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Not foie gras, we wouldn’t have been able to afford that then. But none of these seems right, and Graham who might have recalled it is not here to ask, and the children were too young. So there, memory is a will-o’-the-wisp, it has its own mind, and will not be cajoled.


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Keeping him out of the pub

We read a lot about food in newspapers and magazines. I don’t mean recipes, telling us what we might go out and buy and cook for dinner, though there’s a great deal of that too, I mean food as news. As good news and bad news. We all know what I mean: butter bad news, margarine good. The demon fat. Polyunsaturated oils better, monounsaturated not so good. Hang on ... it’s not so simple ... there are bad fats and good fats ... and is hydrogenation all that desirable ... and who paid for the research that decided polyunsaturated oils were the answer to all our problems ... surely not a polyunsaturated oil company ... Except now we discover that mono-unsaturated is better after all ... And what about Popeye and iron and spinach; fancy a cartoon character based on a misplaced decimal point, spinach actually having ten times less iron than research appeared to show. Carrots improving night eyesight turning out to be a complete furphy, a story put out during the Second World War so that the Germans wouldn’t guess that the English had invented radar. And all that shellfish we didn’t eat because of the danger of cholesterol ... wasn’t there something dodgy about that research too ...? What’s more, and funnily enough, nutrients somehow seem to work better in food than they do when extracted and served in pill form.


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And so we read our daily papers, trying to keep abreast of the news of which food will save us, which will kill, especially as the protagonists tend to swap places. Sacrilege happens: there’s the high-fat-high-protein-no-carbohydrate diet, scary that, very dangerous, and we all thought entirely discredited, except it seems to work brilliantly, compared with the sensible balance of complex carbohydrates and low fat which public nutritionists insist is the only way; Hollywood celebrities swear by Dr Atkins, they stake their livelihoods on the slender bodies it produces, and is there any evidence that it does any harm? Most of us discover that the promises of the good life turn out to be contingent, or hollow, contradictory, or just plain false. Salvation through food is proving harder than that through faith or works. Both are matters of occasions of sin. Weren’t we all better off when we ate what we could get and were grateful for it? In moderation of course, and after a hard day’s work that kept us fit—and alas, there’s the problem, we live in such plenty that it may destroy us. But paying attention to what we eat is not a new phenomenon. We think that progress has happened, that we are getting better all the time, that we understand more. But it can be salutary to look at some older advice. Philip Muskett’s for instance. He was a doctor in Sydney a hundred years ago. He had strong ideas on the health of the colony, and wrote books telling people how to improve it. The byline on these reads: Late Surgeon to the Sydney Hospital; formerly Surgeon Superintendent to

the New South Wales Government; Medical Superintendent, Quarantine Station, Sydney; and Senior Resident Medical Officer, Sydney Hospital. He thought we should follow a scheme invented in New York, which he describes as ‘ultra-successful’, of loading the slum children of Sydney on to large floating barges every day or so during the hot weather and towing them out beyond the Heads into the fresh air, thus reducing infant mortality—a third of all deaths were of children


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under a year old—a suggestion which makes you think Sydney pollution is of no recent date. This was in a book called An Australian Appeal: The Evil, The Cause, The Remedy, priced at One Shilling. But mainly he was concerned with food and cooking, in two publications, The Art of Living in Australia (1892), and The Book of Diet (1898), the latter an expansion into university lectures of some of the main concerns of the former. I found both these books in the National Library, and they are great fun to read. You could sum up his concerns in three ideas: salads, wine, and the morality of cooking. His emphasis on salads comes from a comparison of the climate of Australia with the same latitudes in Europe. Australia he says ‘is practically Southern Europe’ and so our diet should resemble that part of the world’s. He worries that Australians, in a similar climate to the Italians, eat ten times as much meat as they do. I remember housekeeping in Italy when Lucy was a baby, asking the butcher for enough veal to make a spaghetti sauce for two. It had to be veal because beef wasn’t available; this was in Alassio, in the north, not far from the French border, a good region for olive oil. The butcher gave me a portion slightly smaller than an egg. Rather a shock to my Australian expectations. At home, when we had spaghetti, the meat sauce was the thing, the pasta an accompaniment. Muskett’s ideas hadn’t yet got through to us. He wanted us to eat a lot more vegetables and much more fish. In other words, we should look to the Mediterranean diet for our models— this in books published in the early 1890s. His idea of climatic matching is expanded by Michael Symons in The Shared Table, published at the end of the 1990s. Symons devises parallels with Asia as well as Europe: we should eat Chinese food in Sydney, Thai in Brisbane, French only in Melbourne. Mediterranean climate food is suitable for Adelaide. The idea is that we should choose our diet according to the latitude we live in, translated from the north to the southern hemisphere.


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We ought not to try to move out of our appropriate strip of the globe. Of course I don’t think Symons, purist though he is, really expects us to live in such a straitjacket. He mainly wants us to pay attention to what we are doing, be rational, make informed choices. Muskett insists that the best way to eat vegetables is in salads, not the terrible English kind, of lettuce shredded with a sharp knife, sitting in its own water on a flat plate, that we still were eating in my youth (with condensed milk mayonnaise to boot), but a French salad, the leaves whole, washed or wiped and dried, dressed with good oil (he recommends Crosse and Blackwell’s olive) and a much smaller quantity of good wine vinegar. This is not difficult, the real problem is the salad herbs, the chervil, tarragon, parsley, chives, the mustard and cress or watercress, which are impossible to obtain. We should be eating rocket, and lambs’ lettuce (or mâche). Celery and radishes as a garnish are a poor substitute for this variety, but better than nothing. Moreover, the shape of the bowl is important. Half a perfect sphere is best, and it should be big enough to allow decent tossing: ‘... it is impossible to mix a salad in a vessel very little larger than a soup plate.’ Above all, ‘do not waste money on the meretricious ornamental work which besets many of the bowls exposed for sale’. Muskett spends more than two pages giving his readers this information on how to make and dress a salad. He reckons that the compilers of recipes he’s read have never actually made one since they would so drastically fail if they tried to follow their own advice. Our national dish, he said, should not be tea and damper, but a macédoine of vegetables, a vegetable curry, or ‘a well-concocted salad’. Both his books spend a lot of pages on the detail of good salads, and recommend that we demand the raw materials of our suppliers. I remember talking to Stephanie Alexander, in her early days at Stephanie’s, when she showed me her own restaurant garden with its variety of lettuces, which she had to grow because none were available


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commercially. Now of course there is a good range even in supermarkets. But it’s a gruesome thought that it took a century for Muskett’s ideas to come into practice. I wonder what he would make of the buying of ready-prepared mixed salad leaves—particularly when they come in sealed plastic bags. We acted a bit sooner on his second great recommendation, which is that wine should be our national drink, and ‘take the place of all other liquids, since it is essentially wholesome, hygienic, restorative, and cheering’. It should be a light wine (not fortified like a sherry or port, that is) so that people can drink a lot of it and quench their thirst, without ‘“fatiguing” either head or stomach’. And wine is so much better for us than tea. Though a little coffee can be restorative. And the wine should be cheap so it is within the day-to-day reach of the masses. (I read in the paper this weekend that doctors should stop telling people to give up drinking wine if they want to lose weight, it may actually help them to do so. And because of its relationship with insulin it seems to be good thing for diabetics.) As well as being good for us as a drink, says Muskett, wine will do wonders for the economy. He points out that Paris, with its population of two and a half million, would drink in twelve days the whole wine production of Australia. Since Australia has a population of three million, imagine how good it would be for the wine industry if it had to produce enough for its people to drink a Parisian quantity over twelve months; ‘what a magnificent future only awaits its calling into being’. He describes the sunny smiling landscape of prosperous vineyards turning Australia into a kind of paradise. There are important details we should pay attention to. One is labels. It seems that wine merchants fail to understand the pulling power of a good label. They pay no attention to aesthetic matters. Moreover, as well as being dull, labels are frequently misleading. There is a need for consistency, of names, of precise references to styles and to


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places. Just calling a wine riesling doesn’t help, since one from the Yarra Valley in Victoria will taste quite different and have quite different alcoholic properties from one grown in the Hunter, in New South Wales. We are sorting out these things now (with a little help from the French, telling us we cannot call our sparkling wines champagne, though of course we still do, just not on the label), but again it took the better part of a century. When I was a young woman people still drank claret, and hock. Now chardonnay is a catch-all name for a huge range in both quality and character of wines, though far too often it means poor wine over-oaked with wood chips. As well as being what the chattering classes like to swill. When I got called a ‘chardonnay-swilling socialist poseur’ I was mildly irritated, because I don’t like chardonnay, I prefer riesling or sauvignon blanc, but I enjoyed the attack. You know when people you don’t agree with say nasty things about you that you are worrying them. Once in France I read an article in Elle magazine telling you ways to save money. One was to share your wardrobe with a friend; one suit, one cocktail dress, and so on, that way you could have a designer wardrobe for half the price. As long as you didn’t ever go to the same events. Apart from that I think it’s a horrible idea; fancy not being able to call your clothes your own. Another was to go to bars and chat up Australians you saw sluicing down Chablis. The verb used was écluser, from écluse meaning a lock gate, a sluice. Another version of chardonnay swilling. The idea is that these Rabelaisian characters, full of Chablis, would invite you home for a holiday. I doubt they were going to pay your fare. Wine is also a component in the moral dimension of cookery, says Muskett, along with the education of young women. He writes at length on the importance of cookery in the formation of character. It should have precedence over everything else in education. It’s important for


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health and temperance, but above all it is a medium for training, since it is an art, indeed, a master art. And it’s also a science, the science of applied chemistry. No other element of education so blends the practical and the scientific. It requires accuracy, cleanliness, punctuality, thrift. And most important of all, good cookery is a preventative of drunkenness. If young women are taught to cook well, to provide a delicious and varied diet, it will keep their husbands at home, they won’t need to go off to the pub and drink spirits. The food doesn’t have to be elaborate, or expensive, just well-made, and varied: variety is essential. ‘Monotonous, uninteresting meals depress the spirits and are subversive of appetite, digestion and nutrition.’ Much can be learned from French habits of thriftiness: ‘materials which the English housewife throws away as useless, her French sister skilfully converts into toothsome and nutritious food’. But the sad fact is: ‘millions of our English-speaking race are living this life without the slightest glimmering of what domestic content might be theirs. Surely the word “home” for the artisan should signify something more that a place where he is badly fed’. And drinking wine with this excellent well-cooked food will add to the happiness and harmony of the home, and is much more likely to save a man from drunkenness than preaching total abstinence. Wine is good for you, spirits are not; stay at home and drink wine with the wife and kids, instead of going to the pub and quaffing spirits, or beer, which is hardly better. So, the theory goes, wine is the best promoter of sobriety. He’s done quite a lot of research, has Muskett. He quotes the American president Jefferson to the effect that ‘no nation is drunken where wine is cheap’, and John Dunmore Lang saying that ‘the moderate use of a light wine ... will eventually do much more for the cause of temperance ... than all the Total Abstinence Societies in the land’. Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, says the Bible. And we do. Not just for our stomachs but our arteries and our Alzheimer’s.


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Temperance is less a moral question than a matter for legislation, these days, now driving with certain amounts of alcohol in the blood is a crime. Some people want us to be like certain Scandinavian countries, where any level of alcohol in the blood is illegal, if you are behind the wheel of a car. I read the other day that a lot of pedestrian deaths are owing to a high state of intoxication, people lying down in the middle of motorways for instance. Maybe being drunk on foot will soon be a crime too. But the miserable phenomenon of public drunkenness that used to be so much a feature of, for instance, the industrial city of Newcastle and the coal-mining towns of the Hunter Valley, is not much with us anymore. I remember in my girlhood, during the days of six o’clock closing, the care with which one passed the open doors of pubs in the late afternoon, a necessary negotiation since there were a lot of them, a pub on every corner was the general idea. You approached cautiously, in case some drunken cove came careering out of the door, spewing as he went, or staggering and leering and grabbing hold of you. When you thought you’d be safe you ran past. The change to ten o’clock closing which was supposed to be the ruin of us all did in fact have a civilising effect. Temperance isn’t a word much used these days, though it is by implication. Drink wine in moderation, we are told. But I sometimes detect a wowserish glint in the eyes of the people thus advising us, as though they haven’t quite lost the notion that any such beverages are a work of the devil. Especially when they talk about us ‘using wine’, as though it were heroin or cocaine. We do not ‘use’ food, and neither is that an appropriate term for what we do with wine. Lips that touch alcohol shall never touch mine, said Edwardian young women. They knew how drunkenness destroyed families, men stopping at the pub on the way home on pay day and the wages in their pay packets disappearing, the blokes staggering home late and beating their wives and children. As indeed they still do, though the quaffing of beer and spirits as well as vast quantities of cask


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wines may take place at home and their female partners may join in. But this is not to do with wine at meals. When Graham was a student in Paris he had to go to the dentist, for an abscess I think. Rinse in salt water and avoid alcohol, said the dentist. Okay, said Graham, I’ll stop drinking wine—for small carafes of wine were always included in meals in the student restaurants. No, no, said the dentist, greatly impatient. I said avoid alcohol. I didn’t mention wine! This is a reminder that alcohol and wine are not at all the same thing to a French person, they are separate categories. Wine is local, and natural, it is part of eating a meal, it’s nourishing, good for you. In Zola’s marvellously terrible novel L’Assommoir it is alcohol that destroys people. L’Assommoir gets its title from the name of a drinking den, and it means literally something that wipes you out, knocks you out, the blow that kills. When an ox is felled by a hammer in a slaughterhouse the verb is assommer. The tavern has its own still, ‘a great copper machine, sweating out alcohol like a slow but persistent spring’, it bubbles away in the yard like ‘some black and midnight deed being done in broad daylight by some morose but powerful and silent worker’. Gervaise the pretty industrious laundress determines that she will have none at her wedding, only wine, because ‘... wine builds a workman up, but spirits were an abomination, poison which robbed a man of his taste for food itself’. But she can’t control her guests, they order up lots of brandy, firewater—not, to be sure, cognac. As the novel proceeds, gradually everything is sacrificed to the lust for spirits, everything is lost, work, honour, love, children, eventually life. This is what the dentist was talking about, the alcohol to be avoided.

* Muskett of course is a fellow of his times, when men were breadwinners and women were housewives. Nevertheless, his advice, to stay at


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home, eat well, drink modestly, and enjoy day to day life, is, if you remove the gender specifics, excellent. And a great many of us are acting on it these days. People do potter round their kitchens making delicious meals and drinking wine with them, though none of that comes from learning cooking at school. What is bizarre is that it should have taken us so long to catch on. It needed two wars in Europe and vast migrations of peoples before we learned what a simple reading of Muskett a hundred years ago would have taught us. What melancholy pig-headed ignorance to have lived in so long.


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Luminous moments

When Graham died people said, Well, of course you’ll sell this house now won’t you and move into something more manageable. Maybe a nice unit somewhere? They expected I might go back to Newcastle. Which of course I thought of, one thinks of everything, it is all one does, in that situation of grief, and at least thinking of what you might do next is better than thinking of what you’ll never do again. But in fact the idea of going back to Newcastle was never more than an entertainment, an idle fantasy. I don’t know any of my contemporaries from my school and university days, I think a lot of us moved away, the people I kept in touch with are a generation older, and I no longer have connections with close family relations. And where would I live? I love my house, after nearly forty years I am beginning to get it right. The same with the garden. And how could I ever find a study like mine? So big, room for great piles of stuff, the partner’s desk which I fill up all by myself, a table, a computer desk, bookshelves, I can sit looking down on to the garden, into the trees, and in winter the hills, the sun flooding in, I am going to have to get up and pull the curtains, it is not good for the eyes to have such brilliant light on the page. Even the stairs useful for a person of my sedentary life. And then there is Canberra. When we first lived here we planned to leave as soon as possible, but not immediately managing that we chose


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not to when opportunities came, and now I couldn’t bear to go, even though I do so miss the sea. But I am addicted to its light, the seasons, the birds—the currawongs singing the frost, the joyous schoolyard racket of summer dawns, the music of the magpies. And the great institutions, the National Library, the Gallery. We have just had a Bonnard exhibition and wandering around gazing at his light-filled canvases I realised his paintings are very much like novels. They are about luminous moments, and so are novels. There is a painting called ‘Woman in Black’, of a young woman in a café, so I guess, in a hat and a necklace and a sleeveless dress, she sits there in a rather dreamy way and in that stillness, that self-containedness, she is a whole narrative. As is the woman in ‘The Red Dressing Gown’, who sits thoughtfully, somehow greedily, eating. Bonnard catches the essential mysteriousness of people, and sets up in us the desire to know. Who is she? Where does she come from? What is happening to her? What will become of her? All those questions which novels ask and which I understood in the objects in the exhibition I curated for the Newcastle Museum. It’s as though all these questions are somehow vibrating in the air of the painting and create the tension in its stillness. You might think it is a paradox, that stillness should be so alive, but when you think of it, it isn’t, really, because it is where the life of the imagination is going on. Another thing that Bonnard does is dining tables. When I first started watching French films, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, back in the sixties, I fell in love with the dining table scenes, the white tablecloths, the napkins, the plates, the bowls of soup, the structured dishes, the pyramids of fruit. They are the emblem of the ordered life, where the daily necessities of eating, which could be sordid, or a chore, become small ceremonies, and so capable of immanence, as well as of immense—or very slight, which may be more sinister—subversion. Where disruption of this very small ordered beauty is particularly shocking, where spilt wine is not just a matter for the laundry but an


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image of violence at a deep emotional level. It may be muted, verbal, silent, but it is still utterly destructive. Bonnard’s tables with their historical and inherited and new objects, the napkin rings, the decanters, the jugs and cups and plates, the knives and forks, the flowers in a jar and grapes in a dish, their sense of food consumed, are not such sites of violence, not at this moment. Sometimes the meal has not begun, more often it is over, there are crumbs, and the last of the wine and the fruit. But often there is a cat sitting on them, which is quite transgressive. When we used to drag our kids round museums in Europe we used to offer them as a treat the buying of a postcard at the end. Look carefully at the pictures, we’d say, and on the way out you can buy a postcard of your favourite one. Well, they were young, they fell for it for quite a while. In fact they loved it. The postcards are still around somewhere, they turn up from time to time and with them all sorts of odd memories. I remember Lucy had one of Bonnard’s cat, we all knew cats were not supposed to sit on tables, at the same time as we knew our cat was always trying to, and being shooed off, and occasionally getting away with it. The kids got a little thrill from this cat being allowed to behave so badly. In front of the woman is a plate with a fish on it, whether it is a real piece of fish that Bonnard has painted there, or a pattern on the plate, it is impossible to tell, and this in itself is curiously disturbing. The cat’s ears are pricked, it has that wonderfully alert and falsely oblivious expression that cats do so well. In another the cat is standing on the table, a child petting it. Bonnard is not interested in action, but being. Action has happened, or will happen, but now there is the moment. His great many paintings of Marthe, his lover and later wife, in her bath, lying on her bed with the light shining on her lovely round bottom, taking off her nightie, always until the end of her life as young and shapely as at the beginning, are moments of being, in a kind of self-absorption that is


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monstrous, and grand. She too is mysterious, that is what gives her such volume and substance, but she is also a character in the paintings, and finally elusive. However intimately he shows us her body, we cannot know her. She carries a bowl of milk for the cat, her face remote, inscrutable, and yet her action, and the table with jug and plate, the vase of anemones, are poignantly domestic. There will never be answers to the Bonnard questions, not from him, though we can enjoy the puzzles; the way we live our lives is our answer. The questions are our business, the luminous moments are paint on canvas, they want us to gaze, they invite us to dwell in their dazzlement. Looking at Bonnard’s tables I remember all the restaurants in France that I have been into. Modest ones, usually, we were mostly a family, and quite hard up, and even later we liked the idea of a number of interesting small meals rather than blowing the whole budget on a great three-star feast; what a nerve-racking investment. Suppose we spent all our eating money and it wasn’t any good? The three-star restaurants are the great temples of gastronomy, to be approached with awe and reverence in the hope that the god will reveal himself, that the stars will show us the mysteries of his immortal food. You have to be sufficiently cleansed and purified, you are making a pilgrimage, whereas the provincial restaurants I like are places for a decent feed after a heavy day’s gazing at Romanesque churches and medieval villages. Stepping into these old rooms, the promise of them, so calm and busy. The cotton tablecloths, often red-checked, frequently pink, perhaps with paper over, the generous cloth napkins, the basket of bread immediately brought, the excitement of the menu, which we had already tasted, having examined it quite carefully outside before we chose this particular place. When the children were small we would order three meals, one for them to share, and nearly always the patron


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would arrange it so they had their own two little pieces of steak, or chicken, or dessert, so they didn’t have to divide it up. I say patron because our favourite establishments were the kind where a husband does the cooking and the wife runs the dining room. There is something remarkably domestic about these places, they are entirely professional and businesslike eating houses, but there is something about the rooms, often but not always small, and their furnishing, the curtains, the sideboard, that is homely. The décor is not glitzy or glamorous, but affectionate; time-honoured, usually, sometimes time-worn, with a kind of beloved shabbiness. Often the decoration is regional, copper vessels, ceramic pots, painted plates. And small vases of flowers; your heart sinks a bit if they are plastic, whereas straggly handfuls picked from the garden or the roadside are cheering. There are large cloth napkins, often in the warm pink that gives a glow to the room, and the china is traditional, faïence in immemorial patterns or stamped with the restaurant’s name. This is all part of the atmosphere, but there’s something else, like a distillation of the essence of all the good meals that have been eaten here. So many people enjoying themselves, so much conviviality, such simply earthly pleasure, have left their impression on the room. It was because of going to this sort of restaurant that I started writing for Epicurean about meals like short stories, with a beginning, a middle and an end, or introduction, development, climax, if you want to put it in a more formal (and dull) fashion. One of my first articles for them (it was called ‘Notes of a Francophile Housewife’—I was so fearless then) was about having little first courses to start the meal, something light, a beetroot salad, for instance, with maybe witloof, Belgian endive, sliced through it, or a carrot salad, or tomato, or mushroom, eggs with tapénade, followed by a meat dish with a garnishing vegetable, then cheese and fruit, or a pudding if you live with sweettoothed slender people. I meant these meals for everyday; they are a


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version of my mother’s meat and three veg, you just have one vegetable first and another with the meat, they are less effort in a lot of ways because the timing is less complicated. And you can also have some trout pâté first, or sardines, or some sort of smoked fish, and maybe you would be having then pasta for a main course, or a dish of courgettes and tomatoes. It’s the leisureliness, the thoughtfulness, of these small meals that is their pleasure. You can see I am not a person who likes to hurry over meals. And I am lucky Lucy lives with me, because every mealtime is an occasion of some small ceremony: the blue and white plates, the tall wine glasses, the good cutlery. Even if the long table has got into working mode—covered in bits of paper, books, magazines, vital letters, urgent bills, whatever— and a space has to be cleared at one end, we will light the lamp and the small setting will glow with its brief but always available promise of comfort. I can see it in my mind’s eye, painted by Bonnard. But, being life and not art, here, at these moments, it is safe from subversion. Back to the restaurant. You are sitting reading the menu, considering what to choose. I still think that this moment of anticipation is the best part of the meal, when all is possible: it will be perfectly cooked, the flavours will be exquisite, the ingredients breathtakingly fresh, whereas even the most superb meal is likely not to be quite so good as the imagination has pictured it. And meals are so sad; by the time you get to the end of the main course you know it is just about over; soon you will have to get up and go away and that will be the end of that, until next time. It’s a melancholy moment, this realisation. Maybe that is why I often like to finish the meals I serve with cheese and fruit, so you can sit nibbling, postponing the inevitable; it’s not so final as a tart, or a mousse, or a charlotte. Such spectacular finishes, saying: this is definitely it. Now that our capacious, ironclad appetites are no more, and we have given up coffee, and liqueurs, and all those prolongations of the experience. A little herb tea is not quite the same.


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And of course I know that my nostalgia is not just for those meals, it is for my youth, my lost husband, the children who have grown up, so that little family unit so safe against the world has no being any more. Of course you want your children to grow up, it would be a disaster if they didn’t, but their childhood is part of your youth, and the departure of that is a melancholy thing. Bonnard’s luminous moments are also moments of past time. The young women in those paintings are dead, the children grew up and died too and their children turned into executors of their great uncle’s estate, giving permission for us to see poignant photographs of their parents’ small selves. And this is one reason why works of art give us such pleasure; in them the evanescent moment lasts for ever, and reminds us that so too, in our mind’s eye, are the precious moments of our lives everlasting. In Spider Cup I had Elinor remembering an occasion five years before when the family stood on a bridge over a little stream, after lunch in the thirteenth-century vaulted stone cellar dining room of a country restaurant, when the family was together, her husband hadn’t left her for another younger woman. A lunch, by the way, that I can describe in detail, I know it because I ate it, before I gave it to her, in a restaurant called le Pont de Palmas, on the road between Séverac le Château and Rodez, in the depths of the Rouergue, a village not very close to anything but other small villages. Not far from the place in the woods where the duke had his wife Gloriande murdered. As a meal it was more a novel than a short story. We ate a soup of potato and leek, then great platters of charcuterie, raw ham and coarse local sausage of great excellence, with white unsalted butter, accompanied by crudités, raw vegetable salads, next langoustines or brains or scallops, a vegetable, followed by duck or guinea fowl or leg of lamb with their own garnishes, then cheeses, then lovely local peaches or profiteroles, all washed down with a lot of Marcillac which is quite nearby. We knew it wasn’t going to be dear, so we took relations,


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friends and neighbours; the bill for eight was $50. Certainly it was 1977, but still very cheap. Even more wonderful than the price was the fact that I could eat all that! Anyway, Elinor thinks that somewhere not far away in space, as space goes, five light years away in fact, that image is still happening, it is still current, and she wants to think of it like that still, that whatever has happened since cannot undo the truth of that moment. In Bonnard, there on the canvas, the child still sits at the table, the white cat beside him, the woman still looks out at us, the painted fish that is maybe real, maybe twice painted, is still there for us to examine. Marthe still washes her lovely body, and Bonnard still delights in looking at it. And the cat still waits for his saucer of milk while the light of that summer, more than eighty years ago now, still falls with unabated brilliance in shafts across the room. And still the stillness vibrates with questions. A contemporary critic, called Claude Roger-Marx, said that Bonnard ‘discovered strange and wonderful countries even in boudoirs and drawing-rooms’. I wonder that he would need to say ‘even’. Where else are strange and wonderful countries to be found, if not in those places where people live and have their being, and think and use their imaginations?

* Of course, I do not need to live in Canberra to go to Bonnard exhibitions at the National Gallery. I could drive down from Newcastle, as Jean and Martin did from Kilaben Bay, and stay several days and go several times a day and visit friends like me and have meals and talk. I could. But then there’s the National Library too, with every book ever published in Australia, so is its charter, plus a lot of others. I use it for reference all the time: the sharks in The Golden Dress, that is how I found the details of the fatal shark attack on our nearby beach which


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I only vaguely remembered from when I was twelve, the peacekeepers in Somalia for the new novel I am writing, the Pixie O’Harris books from my childhood that I no longer own and wanted to write about for a lecture on Henry Kendall. They even have Jessie Conrad’s cookbook, which is quite something. I like living in the same city as the National Library. When I came to Canberra people said that married people who arrived here straightaway had a baby, and single people straightaway got married. I was in the second category, and then in the first. There were weird statistics, half the population was at school, a quarter of it was under four years old, something like that. It was a city of children, and children mean hope, and possibility, and excitement. Though it was hard for all the young mothers, their own mothers were somewhere else. Now there are more generations, grandparents and grandchildren are less often separated. My children love their birthplace. James has lived in Newcastle and Sydney, and now has come back here, so how could I move, from the city where my children want to live?

* Still, you need to get out of it sometimes. The gentleman caller and I went to the coast the other day to do some looking at the sea. We went in to Tuross and were charmed by its beauty and amazing water views. We had lunch at a restaurant called the Pickled Octopus which was a boathouse on the river, eating superb oysters and fresh prawns, drinking white wine and feasting our eyes on the wide expanse of the Tuross River. Over the road was a block of land for sale. Marvellous views, and the working boathouses opposite. We went to the estate agent and did we thought an excellent impersonation of a prosperous couple keen to buy a coast property. The land was sloping and very small and cost $395,000. We went back to the restaurant the next day


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and ate char-grilled baby octopus on a Greek salad which was brilliant and had another look and realised that the working boathouses were for the tourist trade; at weekends this place would be stuffed with visitors with the takeaway next door doing a roaring trade. Of course we knew all along that we had no intention of buying the block. But we planned how we’d do it, what sort of dwelling we would get our architect to build. We had a wonderful time. Working out the logistics, the finances, the aesthetics. Imagining yourself doing something can be more fun that actually carrying it out. Certainly cheaper. We came happily back to Canberra, exhilarated with our adventures in not buying a block of sea-coast land. Or the houseboat that was a snip at $40,000. So we were told. The second day at the restaurant the waitress said if we wanted the flathead fillets they would be half an hour. After a while we saw a number of pelicans zooming about on the water beneath with their necks gobbling like boa constrictors eating chickens. When we looked over the edge of the veranda there was a young man gutting fish at a table on the edge of the wharf and throwing the heads, guts and skeletons to the pelicans. Clearly a familiar ritual to all concerned. The flathead have arrived. I lean over the balcony and take photographs; I hope they will be luminous moments, too, in their own way.


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Strawberries at midnight

Food is memory; memory is food. I knew that before I started writing this book, it was one of the reasons I wanted to, but it can still catch me by surprise. At the weekend Lucy and I drove down to the coast to visit Kate, down the Macquarie Pass which is still a reminder of the difficulty and skill of making roads down steep mountains. It has been improved a bit but is still narrow and breathtakingly hairpinned and exhilarating, with sheer cliff faces in vermilion and grey and little waterfalls running out of crevices. It takes you back to days when motoring was an achievement of a special kind on a number of levels. Then down on the coast it is another country; warm, balmy, the gardens lush, with a lot of gaudy azaleas and a few surprised looking daffodils. What have they to do with such warm weather? Kate told us her house was ten down from the station so we counted, but she could have said the one with the garden, because it spills out on to the nature strip in two large semicircles of olive trees, roses—already blooming, some of them—pelargoniums, nasturtiums. The houses nearby have the seaside gardens of my childhood: excellent lawns, perfectly manicured to the edge of the concrete paths, maybe a shrub. Tidy is the word for them. Whereas Kate’s is gloriously messy—glorious my word, messy the neighbours’.


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When you get out of the car, an evanescent scent of honey, a long whippy primitive rose with the smiling daisy-like faces I love, magnolias, may. Kate has just planted twenty-two roses on top of the forty she already had and they are still only sticks so we have to go back in summer when they are all blooming. Inside on the coffee table is a glass vase with an armful of arum lilies—the back garden is full of them—and on a tall-stemmed old blue and white dish a melon, large, round, its rind like green and yellow watered silk. It is a gift, a heritage melon from the gardens of Vaucluse House. A watermelon, she asked, but no, said her friend, the curator, who brought it, a jam melon. And there I am, back in my childhood. Melon and lemon jam. Melon and ginger and lemon jam. Melon and pineapple. Not a favourite. Not of mine. My parents were keen on it because of its thriftiness—it is very easy to make a great deal of melon and lemon jam. The thing is it doesn’t to my mind taste very nice. It tastes like a trick, it’s not real, the melon flavour is very dull, it is only the additives that redeem it and that not well I reckon. When I describe this melon to my brother-in-law Fred he says, Ah yes, budget jam, and adds that there were rumours that the commercial kind was made of chokoes. Indeed, that would be right, choko pretending to be melon, no wonder I never thought it was worth eating. Strawberry now, but we rarely had that, not when I was young, too expensive, and no means of making it, Newcastle not a place for strawberries, though we did have blackberry when we walked along the beach to the sewer farm then into Murdering Gully and picked them. Though even that was likely to be stretched with apple. Kate has a story here, from her childhood: tomato jam with a bottle of raspberry essence so you thought you were eating raspberry jam. The tomato seeds masquerading as those of the berries. I haven’t heard of that one. Though I have heard of some sort of jam—maybe


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plum?—being seeded with tiny chips of wood to make people think it was raspberry. My mother sometimes made tomato jam, which didn’t pretend to be anything but itself, it was a bit strange but very good. Kate and I agree it is important to keep telling these stories, otherwise present generations will have no sense of what life used to be like. These days people who are hard up tend to spend unfortunate amounts of money on junk food, which makes them fat and prone to disease, they don’t make do in that admirably proud way people once did. And there’s another memory, conjured up by the absence of strawberry jam. Going to New Zealand, the year I was married, staying with my mother-in-law in Christchurch. I liked staying with her, she was a sharp intelligent old lady, and I always felt she was fond of me. She’d make Anzac biscuits and Afghans and sticky rich fruit cake and we’d have little feasts together. Graham was the child of her later years, she was well over forty when he was born, and his siblings were ten and thirteen years older. He was a difficult child to rear, as they used to say, having a delicate chest and in those years before antibiotics spending considerable portions of the winters of his school years in bed. (That might have had something to do with his having to ride his bike through vile weather.) But I think she regarded him as a precious if difficult little gift, exasperating maybe, and demanding—he was always making things and asking her for awkward raw materials—but she liked to give him special care. He was clever and won scholarships to private schools and then to Cambridge, and she was delighted when he married me. He was twenty-eight and she thought he was a confirmed bachelor. Whereas, Graham said, I considered I was a gay bachelor. Neither of which adjectives can possibly be used in the context any more. Anyway, New Zealand, New Year’s Eve. Nobody else in the house is up. Christchurch is edged by market gardens, at this time of the year offering straight-from-the-soil tomatoes and strawberries. People ate a


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lot of the small highly-flavoured tomatoes, for most meals, and the same with the strawberries, which they also made into jam. We’d been and bought a big box of them, and Graham and I sat up and celebrated our first ever New Year’s Eve together with French champagne— I know it would have been, it was quite modestly priced in those days and the local wine industry wasn’t yet up to much—and the strawberries. My mother-in-law was horrified that we were going to eat them just as they were. No icing sugar? No cream? Cream being along with butter another staple food. I like them straight, I said, and it was lovely, feasting on these oddly-sized misshapen sweet fruits, it was the first time in my life I had ever eaten as many strawberries as I wanted. It was a delicious moment and it seemed a very good omen for the future. We’d been married six months and it was another honeymoon we were having, a series of occasions of bliss. Strawberries at midnight: now forty years later the moment is as vivid as when it happened. Of course Kate’s melon jam might be delicious. We eat her cumquat marmalade for breakfast, which she made when she was staying at an orchard in the Gold Coast hinterland. It is in a big square jar and haphazardly chopped, the small fruits simply roughly halved and the whole stiff and thick so you can’t spread it, you have to have a lot and pile it up on your toast. She is hoping a friend will come with a camera because she wants a photo of this melon before she has to turn it into jam and luckily I’ve brought mine and am glad of the excuse to take a photo of it too, so I lean at different angles round the room and take arty pictures of it and the lilies. Her rooms are not big but highceilinged with elegant complicated mouldings, they are painted in white colours—she tells me they are Sea Pearl and Shell on the colour card but I thought of clotted cream—so they make a luminous space for paintings, and the sun floods in through bevelled glass doors. The train runs past her house, beyond a thick tall hedge of conifers—which reminds me of the house in Lozère and the connection


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to the great metropolis down the line—and as it comes to the level crossing it hoots, a long musical horn sound, rather melancholy but romantic. It makes me think of a gorgeous romantic line of poetry, Ah how sadly the horn sounds in the forest—Ah que le son du cor est triste dans le bois—which is Roland blowing his horn to summon his fellows to fight the Saracens but too late, he is betrayed, help never comes and Roland is destroyed. An old high tale, full of glamour and treachery and courage, caught there in the long wind-torn wail of the train. But when I tell John this he says he hates that sound, it is the sound that killed his mother, she was stopped in her horse and sulky waiting for the train to pass and when it blew its horn the horse reared and she was thrown out and killed. He was three years old. I know this story, but hadn’t remembered it in the context, and was heart-struck that I hadn’t, and now when I remember the long wailing hoot of the train it comes with horror too. On top of that Kate tells me of a woman killed on the crossing just a week or so ago, she thought it was safe to run under the gates since the train she had just got off was stopped at the station, but did not see the express coming the other way. Lozère again; I used to cross the line when the gates were closed but only if I saw them actually moving down. You knew if you waited you’d miss the train you’d come to catch. There was a sign up there that said, Attention, one train can hide another, and that is what happened to the young woman killed here. The bells of the crossing and the noise of the stopped train must have obscured the sound of the express. We talk for quite a long time, sadly and with dismay, about this death. Kate was on the train the woman had got off, going to Sydney, taking a bunch of gerberas to a friend’s book launch, her train was stopped at the next station and she ended up walking the five kilometres back. I don’t think it is ghoulish, this conversation. It is paying attention, a kind of mourning, a recognition of the dreadful fragility and luck of life.


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We stayed with Kate for two nights, a day and a half. This is some of the food that she made. An upside down apple and cinnamon cake. Tomatoes slow-baked with olive oil and sumac. A thick rather bready tomato tart. Gemfish quickly cooked in olive oil. A salad of lentils and currants. Chicken wings with kumera—she said it was the first time she’d eaten chicken wings and she wouldn’t again. A savoury bread and butter pudding with cheese. A strawberry and rhubarb cobbler. Roasted and marinated red pepper salad. A fennel tart, in the manner of a tarte Tatin. The cumquat marmalade. And a wonderful lemon pickle which is made from a hundred-year-old family recipe. Lucy loved the cobbler, so here is the recipe.

R h u b a r b a n d s t r a w b e r r y c o bbl e r | Cut a bunch of rhubarb in 3 cm pieces, toss with one cup of sugar and two tablespoons of cornflour and put in a buttered dish—Kate made it in an oval white terrine with a green dragon on it, about 7 cups capacity—with 4 tablespoons of orange juice and bake covered in a moderate oven for 20–30 minutes. Add 2 punnets of strawberries hulled and the grated rind of one orange. Make a dough with 11⁄ 2 cups of self-raising flour, pinch salt, 60 grams of butter. Beat an egg with three tablespoons of milk and mix all until just combined. Drop in spoonfuls over fruit and sprinkle with a little sugar. Bake 15–20 minutes till brown. What is good about this is that the strawberries hold their shape so you get these little soft globes of fruit bursting in your mouth, through the much mushier rhubarb. I watched Kate make the fennel tart, and had a go. Here is what I did.


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C a r a m el i s e d fe n n el t a r t — o r t a r t e Ta t i n | In a pan that can go on the stove and in the oven—I use a blue enamel le Creuset frying pan—melt a tablespoon butter in some olive oil so that the bottom is covered. Cut two bulbs of fennel in slices and arrange in the pan. Sprinkle over salt, a little sugar and some slivers of garlic. Cook over quite a hight heat, not stirring but shaking. The idea is that the fennel caramelises and as in all tartes Tatin the point is to get the right degree of caramel without burning—and in the case of a savoury tart, to use enough sugar to caramelise but not sweeten. 10–15 minutes should do. Leave to cool. Cover with pastry and bake in a fairly hot oven until the pastry is cooked. Turn out on to a large plate. Kate sprinkled a little of the cut feathery raw ends of fennel over the top and some olives. You can use commercial pastry or make this excellent pâte brisée.

Pâte brisée 125 grams plain flour 100 grams butter cut in small pieces 1 egg yolk Give a swift turn in a food processor—or rub in by hand—add 2 tablespoons very cold water, give another quick buzz. The essential thing is not to process too much, the butter does not need to be all mixed in. And do not add too much water. Stop as soon as it forms a ball. This is an excellent fine short pastry. Pastry famously needs a light hand to make, and I think this applies even to a machine; it’s quite possible to be heavy-handed even when the machine is doing the work. I like the image of the lightness of hand


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that translates through the technology of the food processor, directly or indirectly it’s a kind of loving touch, involving skill and grace. The tarte Tatin which was originally a sweet tart with apples is an example of a disaster turned into a triumph. It is named after two sisters who ran a hotel near the river Loire. The story goes that one of the demoiselles Tatin, in a hurry, not concentrating, one day put the apple mixture into the pie dish before lining it with pastry. Instead of tipping it out and starting again she left it there and put the pastry on top. There’s also a story that such inverted apple pies were already a dish of the region, and that the demoiselles Tatin simply made an exceptionally good one that became famous. But I like the mistake version. And ironically enough, the disaster isn’t that easy to recreate. It is quite a delicate business to get right. It’s also wonderful made with apricots, fresh, halved, round side down in pan, in a mixture of butter and brown sugar. You need to put a fair whack of butter in to bubble and caramelise with the sugar, that’s why it is so good.

* Kate as well as her own garden of lilies, roses, pelargoniums and a whole lot of citrus trees grown I reckon as much for their beauty as their usefulness, has made a garden at the railway station. This is hard work since it is much subject to vandalism. As is her own, by the pavement. I asked why the olives had chicken wire around their trunks: because of the vandals. She did have barbed wire, but the council took it away. Now she has barbed roses. She is on her fourth lot of olive trees, and she thinks they might be okay now. Vandals are lazy, they tend not to go out of their way, only wrecking what is near their path, and maybe they get bored. Been there, done that, with uprooting olives and chucking them in unlikely places. They were heaving up the sleepers holding in the railway garden and casting them about but the


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council has put in a fence to hold them and so that’s all right. Though there are problems with the electricity men who keep digging it up. On the other side, in the park, trees have been planted and uprooted several times; now she is creeping up on the wreckers, from the edges, which are slightly out of their way, they would have to walk a few metres to get at them. So maybe she will win, after all. Perseverance seems to defeat vandals. She is not basically an extravagant gardener, Kate, she is thrifty in the old way. Picking up cuttings, collecting lilies from the site of a road being bulldozed and walking home miles with them in a wheelbarrow. Acquiring cheap throw-outs at nurseries that she coaxes into new life. Lucy and I planted a rose each, Kate dug a hole, we shoved them in the ground. Aren’t the roots rather all on one side, asked Lucy. They’ll work it out, said Kate. Kate tall and slender, in a long straight pale grey skirt, a white top, a big hat with a silk flower at the front and tweedy shoes like a lady walking along the promenade of the beach at Biarritz in 1935. They’ll work it out, she says, in the voice I can hear in her poems. And they will. They’ll work it out beautifully.

* I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that food books are nearly always autobiographical. They are a record of someone’s life-journey. The best ones make us try to construe them in this way. I remember Elizabeth David offering tantalising glimpses of her life, never enough, we pored over them like a puzzle. The youthful period in Paris, the war in the Middle East, India, the mysterious marriage. I’m not usually very keen on biographies but I was delighted to read David’s, by Artemis Cooper, and have these questions answered. Gertrude Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas but it was Alice’s cookbook that offered the stories of her life. Though the marvellous anecdote about Matisse is Stein’s. Their cook, who was called Hélène, got irritated because


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Matisse was always staying unexpectedly for meals—and worse, he asked the servant beforehand what was for dinner. It was all right for foreigners to do this, said the cook, but not a Frenchman. So she decided she would fry the eggs instead of making an omelette. It takes the same number of eggs—twelve—and the same amount of butter, but, she said, it shows less respect, and he will understand. And then there is M. F. K. Fisher, whom I have to confess I don’t greatly admire. I think W. H. Auden has a lot to answer for in describing her as the best prose stylist in English. I think she is selfindulgent and narcissistic. She did the same thing over and over, breathlessly eulogising the marvellous meals she ate. She belongs to a particular time—the places she borrowed—which allowed her so to indulge herself. It wouldn’t now. I think we might be more sensitive about treating other people in so anthropological a fashion. Though maybe her heirs are the Tuscan renovators and the Provencal restorers colonising desirable cultures and struggling with the locals to get derelict peasant cottages to a pseudo-artless state of Home and Garden photogenuity and then writing best-selling books on the process. Probably more than any other food writer, Fisher is in a permanent state of autobiography. She writes about what she’s done and does not much bother with telling us how we might do it, as David and Toklas so wittily, accurately, and elegantly do. She has her fans, nearly everybody seems to admire her, but sometimes I wonder if it is mainly because they think they ought. At the other extreme, the most practical and manual-like of cookbooks still tells you a lot about its writer. Jessie Conrad dwells little on her life, but once we know that she spends only five hours a day in the kitchen with just the help of one maid preparing two meals, and that her husband Joseph has written a preface without being able to bring himself to read her book, I think we begin to get a picture.

*


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When Kate and I were having one of those conversations that I always have to have with an old friend I haven’t seen for a while, one of those what-we-have-been-reading conversations, the delights and disappointments, she said, Of course what I read for is style. And I wished I’d thought of saying that, putting it so simply and so powerfully. I am sure there are a lot of worthy and doubtless useful books around, but unless they have style I do not want to read them. She didn’t mean the kind of style that is opposed to substance, she meant the kind that is the substance, the kind of writing where the words are the meaning, where paraphrase won’t do, the language is what the book is about. It may be simple, transparent, like Ruth Rendell, or immensely dense and rich like Ulysses, but unless the language is its own new thing why would you read it? Elizabeth David has this sort of style. Kate has it in life as well. The image of her looking as though she is about to walk along the promenade at Biarritz when she is actually planting roses in the garden of a cottage in a working-class township north of Wollongong, that’s her style, it’s in her house, her books, her self. When I tell Carmel about this idea of reading for style she says, Of course. The writing has to sing. If it doesn’t do that, why would you bother? To write or to read. We depart on Sunday afternoon, promising to come back in December when the roses are blooming, quite pleased to leave the balmy summer of the coast and drive up the escarpment to howling winter. A woman in an antique shop tells us there is a massive hailstorm moving up from Goulburn which is not good news but what can we do? Nowhere to hide from a hailstorm on the highway. But though it is excessively windy and Lucy who is always the driver has to wrestle the car on the road and it is pouring with rain it doesn’t hail and we get home to a warm house and the sense of seasons in place. September is too soon for summer.


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But winter is fragile; only a week later and it is hot here too, a forecast of 26 degrees and all the daffodils suddenly wilt and wrinkle. Kate rings up, the temperature is in the middle thirties on the coast. There’s something unnatural about it, she says, something brooding, it feels wrong. As it feels when there is a bushfire about. The forecast is grim, we can expect a long dreary summer of heat and more fires. The newspapers are apocalyptic. I want it to stay winter for longer. Or even spring, spring would do. It does get cooler again, and rains all night. I lie in bed listening to it, gently pouring down. The jubilation of rain.


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Passages of time

24 September 2003 I have been watching Kylie Kwong cooking on the television. Listen to this, she says. She’s tossing Szechuan pepper in a pan, jumping and crackling. Lowering duck breasts into boiling fat which seethes and hisses. Listen to this, she says, doesn’t it sound wonderful? I want to say this as I come out my front door. Listen to the wisteria. It’s quite a late flowering one, in a whole lot of very pale mauve colours, with long delicately dangling panicles of flowers. But first you hear it, full of the numerous loud murmur of bees, then you smell it, rich and dryly honeyed, then you raise your eyes and see it. Listen to the wisteria. Isn’t it lovely? This may look like synaesthesia. Once when I was his student Harri Jones had a poem rejected by James McAuley at Quadrant on the grounds that it contained an unacceptable synaesthesia. It was later used as the title poem of his posthumous volume, The Colour of Cock Crowing. Synaesthesia is speaking of one sense in terms of another. Maybe that it what is happening with Kylie’s food and my flowers. But I don’t think so. I think rather it is a perception of something that is always there, and if we come to such experiences freshly it is what they will offer us, a whole range of sensuous responses that have always been available but we haven’t paid attention to. Food is sight and smell and so are flowers, but pay attention and they are sound as well.


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I’ve just looked at Harri’s poem again, and it occurs to me to wonder if McAuley rejected it not for its suspect synaesthesia but for its typically Harri pun on cocks crowing. It’s a Garden of Eden poem, what he calls ‘the serpent and the woman And all that glory’, and like so much of his work is about love, and sex, and sin, and God whose doubtfulness is endlessly addressed in the marvellous stories His religion has left us. Harri could play all sorts of games with the crowing of cocks and their colours and still be deeply serious about his themes: The cock has crown in your hearts and in mine Since Adam hid himself among the trees And Eve lay waiting for him somewhere. I had never heard the word ‘synaesthesia’ until Harri, extremely disgruntled, mentioned his rejection when I arrived in class that morning. I was his only student (imagine what hoops we’d jump through now, doors open, secretaries dropping past, clumsy distances kept) and I suppose he had just got the letter; his disappointment was somewhat mitigated by his delight at the pompousness of the rejection, he expressed himself quite choicely on that, and of course, I see now, more than forty years later, his suspecting that the poem made McAuley uncomfortable. It’s also a list poem, and when he read it in his great Welsh voice it was like a spell whose terrible magic was irresistible. And now, whenever I think of synaesthesia, even inappropriately, I remember Harri and all he taught me. The class was American literature, and it was wonderful having him all to myself, it’s a way to learn a lot. Though he worried about my being a solitary student so invited me to his WEA night classes which had attracted a mixed and lively group of people, and always had to finish at ten to ten so we could all go over to the pub and order lots of beer before closing time. I was still teetotal then and drank lemon squash which the men


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paid for and I realised only later cost a lot more than beer. Or else we would go to his house and Madeleine would make marvellous bitter black coffee which was part of my education too. As was his reading of poetry, his Welsh preacher’s voice, so full of music and longing and power and love, so grand, so gentle, so erotic; looking back the only word is virtuoso in its range of performance. Harri got Newcastle on to poetry; the town loved it. The town had a Baptist church still holding services in Welsh as late as 1939, maybe there was something in its citizens that recognised his powerful pulpit voice. Harri died a few years later, drowned in the Bogey Hole, a fierce and violent swimming place cut by convicts out of the rock, where the waves dashed and smashed. It was strictly forbidden us; that was one parental rule that I kept. A terrible death for him, since the sea and drowning is a kind of threnody in his poetry. It began when he was in the navy during the war, with its desperate boredom and fear, and becomes the grim music of exile from his beloved unattainable Wales. And so I listen to the wisteria, and think of the deaths of people I have loved, and how terrible it is that they should not be here to know these things. To smell the honey scents, of the wisteria and the lilac too, the long purple panicles of the tree in the back garden that Graham moved from beside the house when we put in the garage, and the white one with its upright spears of blossom that walked in from next door. My neighbour before last planted it, and its suckers made their way into my side garden; the parent is long gone and its present owners with their concrete and carport don’t know that’s where my bushes came from. It wanders about my narrow side yard which is the only place I have to keep the debris of gardening, compost bins and firewood I have grown and things that are going to come in handy one day. When I tell John about the noise of the wisteria he says that for him wisteria always whispers. It whispers of old houses, old people, old


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properties, old loves, and indeed when you think of it great gnarled wisteria walks do belong with old homesteads. I like to think of the long panicles of the flowers whispering together. In the evening we go to Leeanne’s for dinner and she tells us that she has won a local art prize with a portrait of me so John goes and buys a bottle of sparkling burgundy to celebrate. I remark that this is the glamorous drink of my youth, but then we were taught that it was terribly naff, and we had to laugh at ourselves for ever having had such gaudy and vulgar tastes. Just another of the follies of youth we had to be ashamed of. It was one up from passionfruit fizz but in much the same league as Barossa Pearl. And then in Gastronomic Symposiums a decade or so ago I learned that it had suddenly become highly valued again and that its beauties could be discussed learnedly and at length. That’s a good lesson in how uninformed fashion can be. Leeanne made a brilliant fish dish, a fish broth with scallops, prawns and chunks of fish briefly poached in it, served in bowls with coriander and tomato, accompanied by Silo bread toasted with anchovies.

27 October 2003 John has dug me some big holes and planted one of the olives partly on the nature strip and another at the side, as well as a lime at the front. I got this idea from Kate; there’s still plenty of room to walk past and I can test my neighbours for thievery and vandalism if the lime does better here. All were in pots and not much was happening. The idea of the pots was I could put them where there was sun, and with the citrus fruits keep them close to the house to save them from the frost. But they weren’t flourishing. So my orangerie is dissipating. I’m going to put the lemon in a half wine barrel and move all the others up to the next pot bigger. The only citrus that’s doing what it ought is the Kaffir lime, with its leaves good for curries, but there’s a limit to how many of those you can use.


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Gardens get you used to the idea of decay. The lilacs are browning, the wisteria is falling, the Queen of the Night tulips are finished, the camellia flowers withered. But the roses are covered with buds. And it rains. Never have storms and downpours been so smiled upon. We have had water restrictions since the beginning of the month and apart from a slight nervousness about the pots I have not needed to lurch around in the dark doing any hose holding. I say that God does not want our gardens to die. Why doesn’t He just fill the dams then, is the retort. The problem we are told is that it doesn’t rain in the catchment area, which seems rather silly. Wouldn’t you put a dam where the catchment got a lot of rain? The wisteria will be noisy again in winter, when the long swathes of flowers have turned into bean pods which will crack open on frosty nights with a loud report and a scattering of shot against the French windows, so someone is sure to say, Looks like the revolution has begun. Or, Are we hostages, or something like that.

30 October 2003 We go to Ottoman for lunch. It is a Turkish restaurant which does elegant food. Sharif, the owner and chef, said to me once, I am a peasant but I cook aristocratic food. He wanted to get away from the usual hearty jolly Turkish fare and use glamorous ingredients. So he does prawns and scallops and whiting, all sorts of amazing fishy things, and classy meats as well, though you can also get Imam Bayeldi and zucchini fritters and the traditional things, just very delicately done. He goes to the library at Istanbul and finds old recipes and has to get someone to translate them out of their original Arabic. He’s also fascinated by the connection of the Ottoman Empire with the Mogal kingdoms to the east. This visit is strictly business, strictly research; I want to look at the garden. We’ve been watching it slowly form and I think I might put it


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in my garden story, how it resembles a Persian miniature perhaps. But it doesn’t really, though it has a wonderful fountain that makes me think of the Topkapi Palace, with three brass taps that look as though women might come to fill pitchers from them. But there is a kind of garden reference to the lunch, since we eat zucchini flowers, stuffed with goats’ cheese, fetta and pine nuts, including the baby fruit of the plant attached. The first time we had them was visiting friends, they took us for a walk through their garden and we admired the zucchini flowers and five minutes later were eating them, with champagne; they were just the flowers and no stuffing, delicately battered, little bites to pick up in your fingers. This is how Lucy cooks them, a recipe based on Jane Grigson’s.

S t u ffe d z u c ch i n i f l ow e r s Zucchini flowers, with or without a tiny zucchini attached—fruit markets sell them. Filling: 60 grams butter 1 heaped tablespoon parsley 250 grams cheese, diced or grated Thyme 1 onion chopped Marjoram 2 cloves garlic chopped Pepper 125 grams breadcrumbs 2 fillets anchovy chopped 1⁄2 cup dry white wine A handful of chopped black olives The cheese can be cheddar or Gruyere, with a little Parmesan for piquancy—or you could use goats’ cheese or even ricotta. Melt butter and fry onions and garlic gently until soft. Remove from heat, add rest of ingredients and stir well together. This is quite a large quantity, any left over can be formed into a roll and frozen.


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Batter: 125 grams flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 egg 1 tablespoon olive oil

about 150 mls water 1 tablespoon Pernod, or some anise-flavoured liquor

Mix all ingredients in the order above. It is a forgiving mixture, too runny and you can add extra flour, too thick add extra liquid. Stuff zucchini flowers with the filling, form back into flower shape. Dip into batter. You can deep-fry these, but I like them shallow-fried in fresh olive oil. Serve with wedges of lemon. Leftover batter can be stored in the fridge, and used for vegetable fritters: mushrooms, broccoli and cauliflower florets, slices of zucchini, artichokes from the deli, all work very well. So do scallops, the time taken to cook the batter means that the fishy morsels aren’t overdone. Next at Ottoman we had abalone, simply cooked with vegetables, which was interesting, very tender, but no match for the marvellous tuna dish, cubes skewered, char-grilled rare, soft and creamy, served with a little red onion and rocket salad on what is described as a walnut and pomegranate mustard, and is like the walnut sauce you get in the south of France. I’d sort of forgotten about this, I used to make it quite often, so I shall get to and make one out of Elizabeth David, when vegetarian friends come for dinner.

Wa l n u t S a u c e — A i l l a d e To u l o u s a i n e | This actually conflates several of David’s recipes. The ‘aillade’ refers to the garlic in the recipe, and Toulouse is a centre of walnut growing. 120 grams walnuts 3 cloves garlic pepper and a little salt

a thick crustless slice of white bread soaked in cold water and squeezed out (good bread, sourdough or Italian)


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Put in a food processor and chop finely. Add a tablespoon of red wine vinegar and gradually drizzle in olive oil until the sauce is thick and unctuous. It is remarkably simple to make and tastes wonderful. I served it with a whole snapper, poached in a fish kettle with herbs and onions and white wine, the fish covered with cold water, brought slowly to the boil and when it has bubbled strongly twice turned off and the pot removed from the heat. The cooling water cooks the fish, it is moist and tender. A little celery is good with this. And next day I made a salad of leftover fish, with a little thinly sliced red onion, thin slices of celery and flakes of the fish tossed in the sauce—excellent. (You don’t have to be a very percipient reader to notice that I love raw onion, provided it is mild.) David suggests serving it just with celery and bread—very simple and good. And one of the finger foods I like at receptions is narrow sandwiches of chicken mayonnaise and walnut; you could mix minced chicken into this sauce and get an excellent result. I could alternate them with the mock chicken for the lily-viewing party. It’s a bit different from the Ottoman walnut paste, and I did not attempt to put pomegranate in it. Sharif also does a prawn and eggplant dish with pomegranate sauce which is magnificent. I am reminded that pomegranates were going to run like a red thread though this book; here is a fragment of it. All the dishes at Ottoman are entrées, we share them, one after the other, it is enough for lunch on a working day. Though the gentleman caller has a crème brûlée, and Turkish coffee.

7 November 2003 My alarm clock rings on two notes, softly at first but then getting louder, more aggressive, more hysterical; I don’t know how far it


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would go because this shrillness ensures that you turn it off. I don’t often need to set it, only if I have an early appointment, otherwise I just wake up, quite early sometimes, and drowse and half dream and write whatever it is I am about in my head, until I decide it is time to get up and write it on paper. This morning I am thinking of the word shantung, which I had entirely forgotten until I read it yesterday in a David Jones catalogue—made into little coloured bags with cosmetics in—and thought, yes, that is it, shantung is what I want for a dress, a fifties sort of dress, but worn quite recently, in contemporary times, and in an important way crucial to the story of the novel I am writing. Then comes the word ballerina, as in: What are you wearing to the dance? Oh, I am wearing my ballerina. It was a dress with a tight bodice, perhaps shoe-string straps or possibly a sweetheart neckline and an enormous bell-like skirt of a length between the knee and the ankle. Like the corps de ballet in Swan Lake. But it wasn’t a ballerina dress, or a ballerina’s dress, it was just the one word, a ballerina. Audrey Hepburn often wore such a garment when she was going out in the evening, in her movies. And the science teacher at school who often enough managed to get one of us to come top in the state in chemistry wore such dresses under her acid-holed white lab coat, but they were really cocktail dresses, and in taffeta rather than shantung. I am wondering which of the two popular colours to have: apricot or ming blue. Apricot was of course a sort of gaudy orange, and ming was nothing to do with Mr Menzies the prime minister, Ming Menzies, Pig-Iron Bob, it was supposed to be the blue colour of certain Chinese porcelain, but it was actually a terrible lurid turquoise, in fact both colours were objects of derision in our household of three daughters and a dress-making mother, so that though we wore ballerinas we would not have them in ming or apricot. There was something electric and harsh about those colours, they were not pretty, they were not flattering. Brenda had one in shell-pink broderie anglaise. The


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chemistry teacher—we used her Christian name Mabel as a nickname—had one of the most beautiful dusty rose colour, pleated, folded, crumpled into shape. We supposed she wore such dresses to school because she went to so many cocktail parties, this was a way of using up the old ones, in the way we got a new summer dress for the Sunday School anniversary every spring and demoted last year’s to second best. Nobody in my circle ever went to cocktail parties. But maybe Mabel just liked this mode of dressing. I think the ballerina in the story will be ming blue, in the shantung which is a gorgeous fabric, when it’s a decent colour that is, pure silk with a sort of slub through it, and the bodice with bracelet length sleeves and trimmed with swansdown or some sort of fluffy stuff. It’s necessary to the plot and I think that will give the effect I want. I’m deciding on this and how I shall describe it and what sort of emphasis to put on it and how exactly it will come into the story, half dozing half drowsing, but making important decisions, when the alarm goes off, with its usual shock, and more; as I turn to stop it I remember, I didn’t set it. Why is it ringing? And in fact it isn’t. It’s a bird. There’s a bird round here which makes exactly the noise of my alarm clock. I don’t know whether it is its natural sound or whether it’s learned. I’ve heard it before but it catches me every time. Carmel once had a bird in her garden which would whistle ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, learned from the PA system of the school opposite. Of course she put it in a novel. I lie listening to the birds and thinking. Then comes a useful idea: what to do with the leftover veal roast. It wasn’t very good, though it came from the excellent butcher, a bit raggy (I remembered my mother’s despair over rolled beef roasts being messy, and tough as well), and not very wonderfully flavoured though I cooked it with celery and onions, garlic and carrot, not to mention anchovies, white wine and red wine vinegar. I shall turn it into something very fine:


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make a tuna mayonnaise and cover it with that, with a little fine red onion and some capers. And a salad of sliced cucumbers. Vitello tonnato: almost my favourite dish. We are going out for drinks tonight, Leeanne is having a Poussin party, so she says, so we can come home and that will be ready to eat. Poussin is Leeanne’s latest passion. I have sent her an email with his ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ in it, a great painting, and no wonder it inspired Anthony Powell’s great series of ten novels. I am fond of Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, which means Even in Arcady I am, and refers to death. Beautiful young men and a woman in a gentle melancholy landscape examine this inscription on a tombstone, which would seem to have no relevance to them, to their youth and strength, but of course it does. My story, ‘The Ego in Arcadia’, plays with this idea.

23 November 2003 Last night I couldn’t sleep, I lay awake for hours listening to the rain. That part was lovely, the rain calm, steady, serious, I could hear it wetting and soaking deep down to the roots. This bit of the urban forest will be safe for now. Last week was five years since Graham died, somehow an inconceivable length of time. As Clare found out in The Fog Garden, grief is an enormous emotion and does not go away. She saw it as a great cathedral in which she could sit, and understood that, like a real stone cathedral, it would be many years in the making. People said, you will get over your loss, you will forget, but you don’t, and you don’t want to. Grief does not dissipate, it does not even diminish, it is something that exists and must be valued, even treasured. I lie awake listening to the rain, past the moment of the first cautious notes of bedraggled birdsong that call up the dawn. For dinner I’d made a salad out of a long dark green lettuce, furled and pointed as an oversized rosebud, with avocado and tomato and fine


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onion and some haloumi quickly fried. Maybe it was indigestible and that kept me awake. I don’t think so. I have a good tough stomach and never suffer from indigestion. I think insomnia is in the head, not the stomach. This afternoon Nancy is coming for a cup of tea and we will give her a birthday present, a week late. It is a small cylinder of polished wood, with a bulbous lens at one end. A kaleidoscope, the woman at the gallery called it, but kaleidoscopes have scraps of coloured paper, or glass, that shake into patterns as you turn them. This describes itself as a miniscope, it makes its patterns by fracturing and fragmenting the world that you look at through it. It is the opposite of Hans Andersen’s wicked magician’s mirror, which shattered into cruel and ugly pieces that lodged in people’s hearts and eyes and minds and distorted everything. This fragments but does not distort, and its myriad minute images show you how beautiful everyday objects are, an eye, a nose, a lamp, a corner of a window, books, apples, mysteriously beautiful when you turn them into endlessly repeating patterns, that refract and turn and split, but always in perfect harmony. I am going to tell her, it is a nice treasure for a grandma to have in her sitting room. Then when grandchildren come they can look through it and understand there are different ways to perceive the world. I hope she likes it, I love it.

* Later: she did. She did love it. It turns out she is as keen on these miraculous devices as I am. When she was about five, when toys were few and hard to come by, remember it’s the end of the war, there’s rationing and austerity, her father brought home a kaleidoscope. She still remembers the wonder of it, the breathtaking mystery, the magic. The grandchildren may look, or not. Nancy is pleased to have it for herself.


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Novels, philosophy and apricot jam

On the second day of the year, in the middle of several weeks of heat wave, when the temperature was yet again in the high thirties, I made apricot jam. What a bad idea, you might say, to make jam in this sort of weather. But the apricots were ripe, Margaret had picked them from her tree, green, tart, luscious: this was the moment. I’d cut up the fruit the day before, and sprinkled a little sugar on them, so they had formed a copious juice. Eight pounds of fruit to seven pounds of sugar, was what I had worked out. Pounds because on my double scale they were the round figure, what matters is the proportions. That’s it, that’s the recipe, plus the juice of a lemon. I put them on to cook gently; when they are tender it will be time to add the rest of the sugar. Apricots are famous for two things: burning themselves, and burning you. When they get near to setting they seethe angrily and throw up great gouts of boiling sugary fruit, temperature 115, 118, degrees centigrade. But before this they are likely to stick to the pan and burn black, so you have to keep stirring them. Like supping with the devil, you need a long spoon. I put on the CD of Bach cantatas that Lucy gave me for Christmas and sit at the kitchen table. The household has all gone out for the


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afternoon so there I am in unusual solitude. I am reading A. N. Wilson’s book on Iris Murdoch, also a Christmas present from Lucy. Iris Murdoch is one of my favourite novelists in the world. I’m having a good time with this, because Wilson’s interest in her life is for what it tells us about the work, and since he himself is a novelist this is perceptive, though I also notice that he slips in details about the filth of the lavatory and the disgustingness of the meals. I think what wonderful talkers she and her husband must have been, to get people to come and eat awful food in smelly squalor. There were vast quantities of wine, but of inferior quality, since they thought you shouldn’t ruin your palate with good wine. So I sit at the table and read, and because it is a book that you need to keep stopping and thinking about, I jump up every now and then and stir the jam. It is in a deep pot, so early on its eruptions are contained. I stir it and stare into it, thinking of Iris Murdoch and the writing of novels. The quartered fruit are turning over in a rolling boil, and the dense golden sugar syrup seethes like molten amber, full of bubbles like the ancient breath of civilisations, to be found millennia later. Wilson says that Barbara Pym likened novel writing to chutney making, for a while all the ingredients, the sugar, the fruit, the onions, the vinegar, are separate and then they come together in this quite other thing, chutney. Jam is maybe not such a good image of the novel process, too simply innocently, or wickedly, sweet. Bach’s cantatas finish, and I put on Fauré’s Requiem. I remember people used to time the boiling of eggs by the saying of Our Father. I have to wear an oven glove now when I stir, and think not for the first time that wearing glasses can be useful. And I realise I am having a moment of epiphany. The jam, a stylish book making me think, the music, the quietness of the kitchen which though it is being warmed by the boiling jam and the jars bubbling away in hot water to sterilise them is still cooler than outside, all these have the sharpness of bliss.


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And I wonder, if Iris Murdoch had made jam, would she have been a really great novelist? I think she is a wonderful writer, and parts of a lot of her books are great, but I increasingly think she does not live in the world the rest of us inhabit. Something funny happens in most of her novels, halfway through they go all convoluted and melodramatic; love flies about being the malicious god piercing unsuitable people with his arrows and making the plot do strange things. Wilson says she spent a good part of the last ten years of her life reading Heidegger and not being able to make of him the sense she wanted. Murdoch herself claimed she only had philosophy in her novels because that’s what she knew about, she’d rather have had coalmining but didn’t know about that. But she has a philosophical turn of mind, unlike me, I cannot manage it, the words crumble and fall in a heap when I try to read philosophy. But I can follow Wilson’s description of Heidegger’s thoughts as he takes a walk past an oak forest and looks at one of the trees—maybe this is because I have three oak trees in my backyard. Heidegger’s words are: ‘Everything real and true only prospers if mankind fulfils at the same time the two conditions of being ready for the demands of highest heaven and of being safe in the shelter of the fruitful earth: the oak constantly repeats this to the country lane, whose track runs past it.’ My apricot jam is marvellous, firm, sticky, richly fruited, deeply and darkly flavoured, dense amber gold in colour. It offers the pleasures of thrifty housekeeping, of provisioning against times of want, of turning what would be wasted into a treasure. When I ask, would Murdoch have been a better novelist if she had made jam, I am of course speaking metaphorically. I mean any kind of magical domestic task that involves transformation. There’s nothing alchemical about apricot jam, it’s perfectly ordinary, yet very beautiful. It keeps us human, it nourishes us, as do Bach and Fauré and novels. The highest heaven and the fruitful earth.


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The sons of heaven

I once sold this house I am living in. Not quite this house, what it was before two extensions. We had bought it when we first got married because it was much cheaper to have a mortgage than to rent. We planned to stay in Canberra for as short a time as possible so we didn’t pay a lot of attention to the future. We liked its high ceilings and its enormous kitchen. It was a new house because that way we could get a government loan. It didn’t have a view but we were out at work all day and the houses with views were smaller, meaner. By the late seventies we decided it was too small. We would buy another, and we would move to old Canberra, with its gently sloping streets and wide nature strips. So we went house hunting but when we found anything Graham and I liked at all the kids hated it, mainly because the bedrooms were too small. (Really I think because it wasn’t their home that they loved.) And since the house we had faced directly north and was flooded with sunlight all winter, and had French doors opening on to a terrace at the front, we wanted at least these same qualities, and they were hard to come by. The estate agent said, Sell the one you’ve got and you’ll be sure to find another—you’ll have to. I thought this was dreadful advice. Sell a house I loved and end up with something inferior? No thank you. Well,


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she said, why don’t I advertise yours and just see what you might get for it. I said I didn’t think we should do that, it seemed dishonest. The next weekend we had guests for lunch in the garden. Quite a lot of us, I suppose about eight adults, at a long table under the trees. It was before the days of breathalysers, there was plenty of wine and a lot of good food. There was also a mob of children. Late in the afternoon when we were sitting round the table, talking, laughing, drinking wine, one of the kids came out and said there was somebody at the door. The estate agent. She had advertised the house after all and here was a couple come to look over it. I looked at them in horror. Every surface in the kitchen was piled with dirty plates and platters and the remains of lunch. I hadn’t made any attempt to pack the dishwasher, there was too much fun outside. The children inside were being so good and not bothering us because they had set up a most enormous game that snaked all through the house. In those days it had passages and rooms that you could walk through in a set of looping figures of eight, and they had made a surrealistic track from plastic and metal train lines, Lego bits, picture books, jigsaw puzzles, hair ribbons, anything they could find, and a most exotic entourage was travelling round it having a high old time. It involved every single toy and game they possessed and passed through every available floor space, mostly wood with odd carpets that became part of the game. It needed a lot of shouting and laughing as adventures were invented for the entourage. They were high as kites on the excitement of it all and took no notice of the visitors trying to pick their way through. I looked at the agent. I knew I had broken every rule in the houseseller’s catechism. The house hadn’t been very tidy to begin with, I hadn’t bothered much because we were all going to be in the garden and I knew it was the food that mattered. Certainly I’d done nothing in the bedrooms, and the kids’ rooms were absolute tips with all the


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toys pulled out. She looked at me. Didn’t you see the ad in the paper, she said. No, I said, I didn’t look. I was busy. Oh, she said. I’ll leave you to it, I said. After a while they came out into the garden, to have a look at that. None of the adults took much notice of them either. They were high on conversation as well as wine and were not interested in a couple of strangers peering round. When they’d gone I told the story of the mighty game inside, and everybody laughed and had to go and look at it. I said I was quite cross, but I wasn’t really, it was funny, and served her right, I told her not to advertise. By about eight everybody had gone home and I’d loaded the dishwasher and we were all lying about the sitting room watching television and wondering whether to have boiled eggs and a cup of tea for dinner when there was a knock on the door. It was the agent. I’ve sold your house, she said. They just adored it. They’ve made a very good offer. The family lying about the sitting room sat bolt upright with horror. My wife, our mother, she’s sold our house. Out from under us. We’ll be on the streets now, sort of thing. So there, I offer this in these days of house makeovers on television so you can sell the place for a lot more money, nearly as much as you’ve just spent on it, and firms who come in and charge a small fortune to dress your house for the moment of sale. I’ve got much jollier advice. Have a rattling good party, fill the garden with adults having a good time and the house with children creating a marvellous mysterious game all over it. Mess equals fun. For I realised what those people thought they were buying was the life in my house, the pleasure that all these people were taking in being in it. They thought it was a happy house, and that they would be happy in it too. And who knows, they might have been. The agent was annoyed that we said no way, we told you we didn’t


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want to sell it. We’re going to extend, we said. You’ll be overcapitalising, she said, spitefully I thought. She was wrong, the money was well spent. Of course had we bought in Forrest it would have been better spent, would have been worth well over a million today, which mine certainly isn’t, but it might not have proved such a good house, and I’d have had to have a real job to pay the rates. And what is the point in living in a house worth millions if you aren’t a rich person? As it was we built two very large rooms upstairs, the study and bedroom which are the reasons I can never leave. That was at the very end of 1979, and in 1980 I began to publish fiction seriously. I had the room of my own that Virginia Woolf so famously recommends for women who want to be writers. The next extension, a dozen or so years later, is the kitchen. The new upstairs meant that the old dining room which was as narrow as a passage actually became one, with the staircase, and a small room which had been a study was opened up to be a dining room that was an extension of the sitting room. It was a bit of a way from the kitchen and if you were there cooking you could hear gusts of laughter from the guests in the sitting room, not much fun for the cook. So we got in the architect Enrico Taglietti and he designed us a large room, with his wonderful remark, not a kitchen that you eat in but a dining room you cook in. I recommend it for widows; everybody is always in the kitchen with you. The sitting room is in danger of total neglect, except maybe in cold winters when I light the fire. At first Enrico came up with a space several steps down from the existing kitchen and a low hugging roof but we said we wanted to see the sky so he designed a room with a tall pointed ceiling with the triangle of the end gable filled in with glass, and two sets of French doors out on to a terrace, and still a bit of wall; he doesn’t believe a room should be all windows, there should be some walls. There should be a definition between house and view. So we can sit in the kitchen and see the oak trees high against the sky and


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the camellias blooming and the hellebores and the carpeting pink and blue bells. Currawongs as big as cats sit on the garden furniture and it can be disconcerting to see out of the corner of your eye a great black shape falling out of the sky. There are terracotta tiles on the floor, and white Portuguese tiles on some of the walls. I think these are absolutely beautiful, they are handmade and uneven and you can see the faintly rosy hue of the terracotta underneath. No patterns, just this luminous wobbly white. The builder was shocked; we kept the kitchen sink which was already thirty years old, a perfectly ordinary perfectly okay steel kitchen sink, and when he found out how much the Portuguese tiles cost he could not believe that anyone who kept an old sink could be so extravagant. Priorities, we said, but he still did not understand them. The architect was going to build us a fireplace in the wall, at table height, on which we could cook, but it would have meant losing the bay tree we bought at Berrima when I was pregnant with Lucy so we didn’t do it. Now the bay tree is falling down and dying and I rather wish I had. We could light a little fire of wood (I grow my own, prunings and fallen branches not to mention collapsed fences) and cook all sorts of delicious meats and fish and vegetables on the died down embers. Maybe if the bay tree finally carks it we’ll do it. I love it when people come to the house for the first time. They enter the ordinary routinely Cape-Codded cream brick house and suddenly they are in this high vaulted space with the sky and the hills and the oak trees all there before them. And Taglietti knew that this room was cold to the eye, facing directly south, so he put the little triangular windows and set-out box-like windows that are his trademark in the ceiling, so that whenever the sun shines shafts of it fall through and move across the walls and floor. I have often written that the most important thing about a house is the way the light falls in it, and so it is.

*


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It is not supposed to be a good idea to be too fond of objects. Of course not. But too fond: what’s that? Does it imply some monkish existence with a spoon and a knife, a bowl and a pan, some pseudo-Buddhist notion of the spare life? Some consider-the-lilies idea that the Lord will provide? Some Zen approximation of the satisfactions of simplicity? Or a new-Modernist concept of the beauty of minimalism? There are quite strict rules about some of these things but people who invoke them are usually vague about what they are. We would probably all agree that one shouldn’t be too fond of objects, just not about what too fond means. I confess to being very fond of objects. Perhaps too fond. To getting a great deal of pleasure from them. I love having the right tools for the jobs I want to do, tools which often have affectionate narratives attached to them. The copper bowl for beating egg whites which I bought in an enormous ancient-and-modern kitchen shop called Scurfield’s in Jesus Lane in Cambridge, almost on the way to walk the children to school, what a good excuse, I’d call in there after I had dropped them off, and the copper works in making the egg whites rise, it is not magic but a chemical reaction, and I do believe that is why my soufflés are successful. The Elizabeth David ham stand. The omelette pan I bought for Graham. The madeleine moulds, without which we would be eating pleasant plain cakes and not thinking about Proust or memory. The great chefs knives bought at Dehillerin near Les Halles, a breathtaking supplier of every kind of cooks equipment, now alas usually full of Americans shipping crates of stuff back to the States. The cane shopping baskets bought on subsequent occasions at the local Marchand de Couleurs, excellent for shopping on foot; you know that when the basket is full you shouldn’t buy any more because that is all you can carry. Notice that these things are mostly quite classical, none of them is gimmicky or electrical or the latest gadget. I am as fond of my food


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processor and kitchen wand as the next person and would not like to give them up though I have lived without them. But it is not gadgetry that matters here, the egg poachers and crepe makers and vertical grills and such, risible devices that promise to make our lives magically different and soon end up forgotten in the backs of cupboards. It is the carefully made things that people have always used and found satisfactory, whose beauty begins in their function and becomes part of their essential nature. In the collection of stories called The Hanged Man in the Garden which is really a discontinuous narrative and these days would be marketed as a novel, Martha considers her favourite objects. ‘Blue and white Victorian meat-plates. A worn silver cruet that her aunt gave her because none of her own children would be interested. A Swedish stainless steel platter, terrifyingly plain. Faïence dishes with naïve patterns.’ All things funnily enough which I happen to own. But that is the way of novelists, you don’t bother making up the details when they are at hand to be described. Why invent an umbrella when you’ve got a yellow cotton one with a duck’s head handle sitting in the hall. The thing about Martha is that she ‘desires objects, she likes to touch them, to hold them, to possess them’. Just like me. Martha is married to Richard who is a public servant and Graham couldn’t stand him, thought he was based on him and didn’t like it, but the thing is, however tall or short or thin or fat, however precise or sloppy in their habits, garrulous or taciturn, kind or cruel, Graham always thought my male characters were him. Once I said, But this man is so formal, it’s symbolic that he wears suits all the time, and you, you never wear a suit if you can help it. Yes, I know, he said. You just made him the opposite of me, that’s how I can tell he’s based on me. Martha is certainly not me. She is quite like me in a lot of ways but she certainly isn’t me. She’s a character in a fiction. I’m spending this time on Martha because it’s with her that I first


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used the quotation that’s one of my all-time favourites, that I keep coming back to. (Indeed when Leeanne painted my portrait which was hung in the opening exhibition of the annexe to the Portrait Gallery she called it by some of these words.) They are: Things are the sons of heaven, words are the daughters of earth. I had some notion of calling The Fog Garden The Daughters of Earth but my agent said it sounded like a realist novel set in a Soviet Five-Year Plan. The quotation is from Samuel Johnson, but a man called Samuel Madden had a similar form of words some years before, in 1745: Words are men’s daughters but God’s sons are things. Now this is very interesting. Things are the sons of heaven ... Sons are superior to daughters, and so is heaven to earth, so logic tells us that things are being said to be far superior to words. Martha who is a schoolteacher enjoys this quotation, it defends her fondness for objects. But along with me she does not necessarily believe in the implied superiority, being keen on daughters and in love with words. Johnson’s words are out of the preface to his Dictionary, and they have a curious appositeness to some of the theories of the last half of the twentieth century. He says: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish however that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. So there is the dictionary maker speaking. And it is presumably out of a Christian—and a patriarchal—universe; things are superior because they are the creation of God. Words are inferior because they are the work of human beings. But the things which words denote are not


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permanent, and you could see them as more apt to decay than the words for them. I can drop my Smithfield ham stand and shatter it into chunky shards and crumbs of china but I can still speak affectionately of it. I could leave the madeleine tins wet and they would rust but I could still give you the recipe for making little cakes in them. The story in which Martha comforts herself for being possibly too fond of objects was meant to be a perfectly happy one. This of course was a very silly enterprise on my part; the whole point of fiction is disaster. Something has to go wrong or there is no narrative. That’s why all our school compositions about ‘My Holidays’ were mostly so bad, they were accounts of a nice time being had by all. Whereas good stories need things to go tragically wrong, as the newspapers say. They may be put right at the end, or maybe not, or not very well. The charm of detective fiction is right endings: gruesome murders being solved and the world restored for a little while to the safety of justice and knowledge; at least until the next volume. Brock or Dalgleish or Miss Marple will explain everything and society will return to its normal (so we would like to believe) state of fairness and just deserts. So my story, which gives The Hanged Man in the Garden collection its title, was hopeless; as an account of happiness and content, it was dull and pointless. I realised I would have to attack these comforts somehow. At the end Martha has set her table for dinner with green majolica plates and linen napkins, polished cutlery and glasses and a little pot of violets. She is admiring it as a minor work of art and thinks it is good that it should be ephemeral, ‘then it can be created again like a song played on the piano by a talented but amateur musician’. But ... a door is left open, there is a sudden chill wind blasting through the house, tugging down the curtains, wrecking the table, the glasses lie in sharp shards, the flesh of prawns is scattered in a fragile dangerous debris of green majolica—but even as Martha jumps up in alarm she sees that it is only her fear, that the dinner table is safe, this


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time. How safe it and she and her family will remain is another matter; the note of darkness has been introduced and will not go away. It is not the breaking of the things which is important, but the disaster the destruction signifies. This is enough to sharpen the story, to give it an edge. Of course the nice thing about food books is they don’t need fear, or threat, the worst that may happen is a soufflé falling, and if you read my words carefully I will save you from this fate. So maybe we like this kind of reading simply because it is never not safe, never offers even a distant frisson of terror. The risotto is always suitably runny and creamy and soft, all at once, the soup is never too salty, the beef is always tender, the Death by Chocolate will never fatten us or clog our arteries, we only flirt with the notion that it will kill us. It so happens that I have some green majolica plates. At one time I considered myself to be collecting them, started off by my friend Gerry whom I have known since we were seven so she is truly my longest friend. She gave me a Wedgwood majolica plate in the shape of a leaf when we were still students. These days Gerry likes to haunt Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul op shops and makes some amazing finds especially in posh suburbs; she is fond of Depression glass and forties and fifties German porcelain; these belong to the age group that is dying now and having its possessions offloaded by unappreciative offspring. I occasionally follow her example and once when I had some time to pass waiting for a publisher in a classy suburb of Sydney I spent it in the St Vinny’s over the way and found some beautiful greeny-blue Booth Edwardian dragon plates so cheap I had to buy them, even though I had to cart them home via Melbourne. At the beginning of my married life I bought some more of Gerry’s leaf plates to eat dessert off, then found various versions with strange leaves and fruits and flowers in antique shops, mainly in New Zealand but once in remote Tasmania. They are still to be had quite easily


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but they cost a vast amount of money so I have stopped collecting them. I am inordinately fond of them. The other day Brenda and Fred rang up at the last minute and said could they come and spend the night so I went to the market and got a free-range chicken and did the Maggie Beer recipe. No time for dessert; I bought cheese and fruit, and arranged a pyramid of small blushing red Corella pears on a tallish footed majolica plate (the one Martha had her prawns on), piled strawberries on a lower one, and mandarins on a lower still, put cheeses on a blue and white Victorian platter and arranged them at the end of the table. I enjoyed the look of them greatly. We ate the fruit off the green leaf plates and their beauty on green majolica made them a feast. I specially like the combination of faded blue and white with this green. I don’t any more use tablecloths. Once when I was barely married we went to a very grand dinner party given by some German people at the university and a bit of red wine spilt on the starched white linen cloth. It doesn’t matter, said our hostess. I asked her how she got red wine stains out of linen (I was twenty-three and shy) and she said she had no idea, she sent them to the laundry. I was crushed. Now I have an old pine table, nineteenth-century Welsh it is supposed to be, and it shows its years, it is battered and ink-stained and scratched and plates look wonderful on it. I like furniture that is old, that has suffered, provided it was handsome in the first place it is like a person whose life shows in the weathering of their face. When I buy new things I think, how will it look when it is shabby? So, white plates, or blue and white, and tall wine glasses (I am always wittering on about tall wine glasses) and cloth napkins and odd old oval serving plates that I find for small sums in the kind of antique shops that lean towards junk, and setting the table is always a pleasure. I think of Bonnard and his paintings of luminous moments; I have learned to see them in my own table.


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Women have always made these small works of art in what they would call minor ways, and usually for special occasions. My mother would set tea tables with marvellously embroidered cloths, with frail rose-patterned tea cups. I am moved by the work that my foremothers put into the creation of fine handiwork; I don’t do it but I treasure theirs, and I write about it, I put it into words so that later generations who are differently busy will remember them. When I was young we scorned the notion of glory boxes and wedding linen, we would not clutter up our lives with such things. Studying art at school in the late fifties I was an ardent Modernist. A doily was the most ludicrous thing you could think of in such a context, I think there would have been few words we pronounced with such scorn as doily. I used to sit in the library reading art books and covet the terrifying purity of the Bauhaus, of Mies van der Rohe and Gropius and Le Corbusier. I imagined that one day I would live in a house that was a glittering glass cube with occasional pieces of furniture that were in their own right works of art. Then I looked at books on Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed for myself a many-winged dwelling cantilevered over a waterfall. One day Gerry and I went to an old school reunion in Newcastle. You think, Forty-five years! What did we do with all that time? Because oddly enough you don’t feel very different from the girls you were then. You suppose you are, the mirror tells you, but deep inside you know you aren’t much more grown-up than you were when you were young. Gerry brought along a fat encyclopaedic book about design in the sixties with lots of small essentially documentary photographs, and I was reminded of the excitement of setting up house at that time and all the marvellous new designs there were in cutlery and china and fabrics—Arabia and Gense and Jensen and Marimekko—and they truly were revolutionary. They were a complete breakaway from the flowerprinted china of my mother’s generation, or the pretty patterns of


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Noritake and Wedgwood with their gilt and delicacy, or the formalised patterns of the thirties. This was design for a new era, and we had it; still have a lot of it. It was about shape and line and the importance of form following function. There’s nothing like that inventiveness now. You can look back on the household objects that were being designed then and think, that is of its time, new in its time and highly representative of it. As you can look at Georgian glasses, and Victorian meat plates, and Art Deco tea trolleys, and see them belonging so completely to the style of their era. But these days? There’s some cute stuff around, but it’s all pastiche. It’s post-modern. Nobody is designing anything new. They are pillaging. Provencal faïence. Victorian roses. Tuscan rustic. There’s no fresh imagination. Maybe there’s nowhere new to go; maybe it’s all already been done? Gruesome thought. But there’s no doubt nostalgia seems to happen faster. Hardly has a trend passed than it’s being revived. An archaeologist sifting through the debris of contemporary lives would be puzzled. A Clarice Cliff teacup, no problem. An Arabia soup plate, yes. A Gense teaspoon. But dig up, a couple of centuries on, those bowls we bought at Habitat or Home or House the other day ... hmm. Impossible to say. I once visited a friend who was married to the ambassador for France and so lived in the Seidler designed apartments in Paris. You weren’t supposed to have any of your own furniture or indeed any objects of your own at all, they would destroy the purity of the space’s conception as a whole, but they did, they brought things they loved, that were important to them, they did not want to live in a totally impersonal space, but even so they couldn’t warm it up much, it was still a rather terrifyingly designed artistic structure. We’d had dinner with some Australian diplomats before this embassy building was finished; they lived in a big old apartment in the rue Bonaparte, right in the middle of the Left Bank, and were not at all looking forward to having to move


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into the ghetto. The Seidler embassy, even though it follows the codes—five storeys high, for instance—is not really a Parisian building. The thing about living in a glass box is that life is a performance. But where are the odd and messy spaces where you rehearse for it? I wonder ... if circumstances had led to my buying a block of land and having an architect design me the kind of Modern house I in my ambitious teens was sure I was going to have—would I still be living in it? Probably, since I do seem to get attached to the places I have made. But would I be a different person? Would it have turned me into the kind of woman whose life was a performance? Would I be leading a calm, orderly and uncluttered life in it? I certainly didn’t ever envisage a cream double-fronted brick veneer villa in an ordinary suburb. Everybody’s definition of boring. So, why don’t I sell it and acquire the strict Modern house of simple planes and wide windows, where the light falls in spectacular slabs and further works of art are hardly necessary? Because I am not that idealistic sixteen-year-old any more. I live in a house full of objects which I have a superstitious horror of getting rid of. And since I only get any writing done by avoiding housework wherever possible, I know an immaculate living space is beyond my capacity, and these days, beyond my desire. I would find such purity unnatural. I may not feel much older but I have gained a certain self-knowledge. I like things about me that are worn and speak mutely of their history, their past lives, with me and elsewhere. The curtains made of old (but never used) French linen bedsheets. The brass trivet which Nancy gave us for a wedding present, which had a sticker on it saying it was at least a hundred years old, way back then. (Nancy has a marvellous pair of nouveau rococo silver candlesticks: Are they old, I asked. Well, she said, we bought them at a roadside stall in Italy in 1966, so they’re at least that ancient. Funny to think of things becoming antiques in one’s lifetime—apart from oneself, of course.)


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When I showed some friends the ornate walnut chest of drawers we’d just bought they looked at it with distaste and said, we like plain things, Georgian, really. So do I, but I love the elaborate carving on this strangely curved piece. A man in a French antique shop told me that when farmers had a child they would straightaway plant a walnut tree, and when the child got married the tree would be cut down and made into a piece of wedding furniture. I like to think that is the provenance of this. Then there’s a nineteenth-century cedar meat safe. A pale oak Arts and Crafts dumb waiter. A George III elm side table I bought to put the television on but it was far too high (when I bought this new television I got the smallest one in the shop, it looked quite tiny, but when I got it home it was big—because all the others were absolute monsters and dwarfed it) and had a slope so you had to turn your head a bit sideways to look at the telly, which I’ve now put on a low coffee table. But it is so heartbreakingly simple and old, it gives me great pleasure every time I look at it. All this furniture I polish with orange oil so it smells and feels lovely. I’m not tidy but I am quite good at polishing. I haven’t even mentioned the pots. Or the paintings. I have to talk about a print, by Barbara Hanrahan, called ‘Heroes’. When Graham died my friend Lucy came up from Tasmania to stay; it was a funny period, between the death and the funeral, somehow plenty of time, suddenly nothing to do, and we went to an exhibition of Barbara’s work, she was already dead then too, it’s unusual to have such a wonderful lot of stuff available posthumously, and I bought this big print, with her strange surrealistic linear drawings and some flat planes of colour, and offering one of her usual ambiguous narratives. ‘Heroes’ of course is an ironical title, but the words written across the print, dividing it in two, aren’t. Sleep thy last sleep, free from pain and sorrow. Rest where none weep. I said these words over in my head, often. They comforted me. They still do. I summon them from time to time and say


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them over. The picture stands on the piano in the hall, I put it there in a temporary way but it seems a good place so it’s stayed. My house does not go so far as chintzy. It’s eclectic. All these things sit happily together. The sons of heaven ... I have coveted them and acquired them. Once I might have said I desired them, but these days I would reserve that word for different things. My novel Lovers’ Knots pays a lot of attention to desire. At least, one of its characters does. He says, ‘Do you know what it is that everybody desires? It’s desire. They desire to desire. When you lose that you’re as good as dead. Or a saint. Or approaching nirvana. When, all passion spent and not just passion but the faintest odour and expectation of it, we will dewdrop slip into the shining sea.’ I think I believe this too. I have not given up on desire, though its object changes. Once it might have been for clothes, or travelling overseas, or a garden with tall trees. For food, not in a greedy way, but knowing that there were amazing dishes, amazing talents, wanting to taste them all. In my youth it would have been for love, the falling in love kind, but then I had that. And then there was loss and grief, and they were very strangely connected to desire. Their dark shading is part of the pattern. These days I have both passion and content, that is how it appears to me in my seventh decade. I have my gentleman caller, my children, my friends: I know I love them. Beauty matters, and I am lucky, I see it, I have it, looking out my window at what a week ago were bare branches and are now thick with newborn green leaves. The memory of my sixteen Queen of the Night tulips (I shall plant more next year) suddenly there darkly red and gorgeous against the greeny white of the hellebores. The roses so covered with blooms they droop under their fragrant weight. But what really fills me with desire is words. I read them, I want to possess them. I want to make them my own and give them to other


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people. Mine make me breathless and anxious and nervous that they won’t work, and when they come they fill me with an elation that is cautious at first, and then profound. The daughters of earth. While I desire them and can have them, my own and other people’s, I am happy. I am going to finish with some words of another, Alexis Soyer, a French chef who made his fame in England and lusted after words as well as good food. He left France when his kitchen was invaded by revolutionaries and became chef de cuisine at the Reform Club in London where he was famous for his great banquets, including a breakfast for two thousand people on the occasion of Victoria’s coronation. He invented a Magic Stove and Lilliputian Apparatus, which was the first portable stove—quite something in an age which had to get an actual coal or wood fire going before it could boil an egg—and cared about ordinary people; he thought up soup kitchens and the economical soup to serve in them, went to the Crimean War, at his own expense and to the ruin of his health, to fix up camp kitchens and soldiers’ rations—apparently far more men died of food poisoning than of wounds. He reckoned that ‘People only eat to live when they don’t know how to live to eat’, a kind of motto for gourmets, you might say. Soyer liked wonderful words. His gas stove he called a Phidomageireion. One of his books is The Pantropheon or A History of Food and its Preparation in Ancient Times. He used terms like gastrophagy, magiric, geoponist, ebullition, whose meanings you can excavate out of a good dictionary, or a classical education; I think he was having fun, playing games, but also making sure you know that cooking can be a matter of grand and erudite vocabulary. His own prose is elegant and a pleasure to read. This is my favourite quotation, from The Pantropheon, the beginning of a chapter called ‘Pastry’: The art of the pastry-cook consists in preparing certain delicate and nice pastes in all sorts of shapes, in seasoning


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them with discretion, and in sufficient quantity, with meat, butter, sugar, preserves &c. It is a most important branch of the culinary science; unceasingly occupied with flattering the sight as much as the taste, it raises graceful monuments, delicious fortresses, seductive ramparts, which as soon as they are on all sides attacked, totter, crumble and no longer present anything but glorious and ephemeral ruins, like every other work of man—all pass away, whether they be temples, columns, pyramids, or pies. How superb this is, so trenchant, so perfumed, so poignant ... the graceful monuments, the delicious fortresses, the seductive ramparts ... and all passing away. The wonderful climax, with its elegant sly hint of bathos: the temples, columns, pyramids, or pies, all mutable, all mortal, all doomed to be forever lost—except the words for them. So alive they are, in the words for them. Since 1853 we have had these words, and they are as fresh, as lively, as delighting as when they welled as drops of ink from Soyer’s pen: a quill, I should imagine, or perhaps he used one of the new metal nibs. Such glorious daughters of earth. Give me words, any day, every day. Without them the sons of heaven would soon be forever lost.


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Bibliography Baskin, Judith and Dixon, Trisha, Australia’s Timeless Gardens, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1996 Bulfinch, Thomas, Bulfinch’s Mythology, Carlton House, New York, (date not available) Conrad, Jessie, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, William Heinemann, London, 1923 David, Elizabeth, A Book of Mediterranean Food, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1960 The Digger’s Club Newsletter, Spring, Melbourne, 1997

Digger’s Seed Annual 1998, Melbourne Ford, Ford Madox, Provence, The Ecco Press, New York, 1986 (first published 1935) Garzoni, Giovanna and de’Medici, Lorenza, Florentines: A Tuscan Feast, Pavilion Books, London, 1992 Grigson, Jane, English Food, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974 Grigson, Jane, Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986 Halligan, Marion, Eat My Words, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1990 Halligan, Marion, The Hanged Man in the Garden, Penguin, Melbourne, 1989


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Home Production of Selected Foodstuffs, Australia, year ended April 1992, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 1994 Irvine, Sian, Mozzarella: Inventive Recipes from Leading Chefs with Buffalo Mozzarella, Scriptum editions, London, 1998 Lawrence, D. H., Sea and Sardinia, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1945 (first published 1923)

Le Jardin Familial: Legumes Fleurs Fruits Petits Elevages, La Maison Rustique, Paris, 1976 edition Low, Tim, Bush Tucker (Australia’s Wild Food Harvest), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1989 McNair, James, James McNair’s Stews & Casseroles, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1992 Moorhouse, Frank (ed), Days of Wine and Rage, Penguin, Melbourne, 1980 Muskett, Philip, The Art of Living in Australia, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1892 Muskett, Philip, The Book of Diet, George Robertson & Company, Melbourne, 1898 Symons, Michael, One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia, Duck Press, Adelaide, 1982 Symons, Michael, The Shared Table: Ideas for Australian Cuisine, AGPS, Canberra, 1993 Till, Antonia (ed), Loaves and Wishes: Writers Writing on Food, Virago, London, 1992


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Index Aillade Toulousaine (Walnut sauce)

241

Apricot jam

247

Asparagus with haloumi cheese

201

Baked quinces with honey

76

Beef with tomatoes

143

Caesar salad, Lucy’s

33

Cake, fruit Cake, Passover

120 89

Caramelised fennel tart (Tarte Tatin)

229

Char-grilled ox tongue with polenta and salsa verde

136

Chicken with lemons

140

Cobbler, rhubarb and strawberry

228

Daube de boeuf Provençale

150

Duck with wild rice custards

71

Eggs meurette

143

Fennel tart, caramelised (Tarte Tatin)

229

Fish, marinated raw

31

Flathead tails, steamed

31

Fruit cake

120

Galette des rois (Twelfth Night cake)

116

Green tomato pickles, Joan Toohey’s

82

Haloumi salad

35

Iceberg lettuce salad

35

Insalata del Principe di Napoli

36


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Jam, apricot

241

Jelly, quince

75

Joan Toohey’s green tomato pickles

82

Kidneys

138

La daube de boeuf Provençale

150

Lamb, poached pumped

148

Lamb with béarnaise sauce

119

Lucy’s Caesar salad

33

Lucy’s mussels with white wine

199

Madeleines

193

Marinated raw fish

31

Mashed turnips

148

Mussels with white wine, Lucy’s

199

Ox tongue, char-grilled, with polenta and salsa verde

136

Passover cake

89

Pastry (Pâte brisée)

229

Pâte brisée (Pastry)

229

Pickles, Joan Toohey’s green tomato

82

Pizza

38

Poached pumped lamb

148

Poached salmon, whole

120

Polenta

136

Provençal beef stew

150

Pudding, steak and kidney

123

Quince jelly

75

Quince tansy

76


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I n d e x | 275

Quinces with honey, baked Rhubarb and strawberry cobbler

76 228

Risotto, saffron and mozzarella, with rocket

37

Saffron and mozzarella risotto with rocket

37

Salad, haloumi

35

Salad, iceberg lettuce

35

Salad, Lucy’s Caesar

33

Salad of the Prince of Naples

36

Salad, tomato with bocconcini

35

Salad, toasted goats’ cheese

32

Salad, spinach

34

Salmon, whole poached

120

Salsa verde

137

Spinach salad Steak and kidney pudding Steamed flathead tails Stuffed zucchini flowers Tansy, quince Tarte Tatin (Caramelised fennel tart)

34 123 31 240 76 229

Toasted goats’ cheese salad

32

Tomato salad with bocconcini

35

Turnips, mashed

148

Twelfth Night cake (Galette des rois)

116

Walnut sauce (Aillade Toulousaine)

241

Whole poached salmon

120

Zucchini flowers, stuffed

240

The Taste of Memory: Food and Gardens Have Taken Marion Halligan to Some Surprising Places . .

To Have and Have Not

Ghosts I Have Met And Some Others

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Reshaping Remembrance Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory. Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Cleaners

Taken to the Edge

Falling Off the Map- Some Lonely Places of the World

Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

To Taste the Wine

To Taste the Wine

To Taste the Dawn

To Have and To Hold

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Sun

Gardens of the Moon

The Gardens of Adonis

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

The Taste of Memory: Food and Gardens Have Taken Marion Halligan to Some Surprising Places . .

To Have and Have Not

Ghosts I Have Met And Some Others

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Reshaping Remembrance Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory. Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Edge

Taken to the Cleaners

Taken to the Edge

Falling Off the Map- Some Lonely Places of the World

Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

To Taste the Wine

To Taste the Wine

To Taste the Dawn

To Have and To Hold

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Moon

Gardens of the Sun

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