Swimming to the Moon Page 11

  ST ANNE VERSUS IKEA

  Luckily my family has its own patron saint, a woman with a close connection to at least two of its members and, hopefully, an interest in their calm and efficient packing and unpacking. I refer to St Anne (also known as Anna and Hannah), the patron saint of house-moving.

  Yes, we’re moving house again, and if ever a patron saint was called for, it’s now, in approximately the thirtieth residential shift – in three states and three countries – of my life. I guess she must be aware of me already.

  As well as watching over house-movers, St Anne is also the patron saint of carpenters, childless people, horseback riders, grandparents, lace-makers, lost articles, miners, second-hand clothes dealers, poverty, seamstresses, stablemen, women in labour, the Mi’kmaq indigenous people of eastern Canada, and the inhabitants of about thirty towns around the world, from Detroit and Manila to Berlin and Sao Paulo. Oh, and she’s also a protector from storms.

  According to both Christian and Islamic traditions it was St Anne who was the mother of the Virgin Mary, mother-in-law of Joseph (and I suppose, God’s mother-in-law too, sort of ). And of course the grandmother of Jesus Christ, although they left her out of most of the baby pictures.

  As it happens, both my partner and my youngest daughter (coincidentally named Anna) were born on their saint’s saint-and-feast day, honoured in the Eastern calendar on July 25. I hope that counts for something, or at least equates in the next couple of weeks with the good fortunes of lace-makers and horse riders.

  I’m hoping that St Anne will now cast her serene countenance over Telstra, the man from Blinds R Us, Foxtel, Reliable Removals, and the truck from Carpets Ahoy, which keeps getting the delivery days confused. Special good luck with the Telstra account discussions, St Anne. Just as well you’re highly esteemed in the Philippines.

  Incidentally, if our carpenter Damian is anything to go by, poor St Anne obviously has her hands full in her saviour-of-carpenters role. Damian managed to break the screen door, bust the hose fittings, and he painstakingly erected the pantry shelves in my study instead of the pantry. But then he didn’t charge me extra for the unwanted pantry shelves, so clearly, she was looking after both of us. And the tins of tomato puree and baked beans do add colour to my workplace. I wish she’d have a word with Damian though about his lunch rubbish and the loud, 7.00 a.m. talkback radio. Also about flushing the toilet.

  Once the furniture is gone and the old house is starkly bare, it can be melancholy to leave a home and its memories, but this time the move has been made easier by sudden next-door neighbours and their two free-ranging dogs: a border collie with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a sullen, skulking German shepherd that barked and howled by night and defecated and urinated in our garden by day.

  And did I mention that the new male neighbour liked to repair, rev and race motorbikes at home, starting daily at 6.00 a.m., near our bedroom? And that his three adolescent daughters’ mobile phones only got reception when they stood outside and shouted into them? St Anne was looking the other way when this family moved in.

  St Anne and Ikea obviously worked out their moving-house differences many years ago, although I don’t see any worship of her occurring in Sweden. By now, everyone knows that all Ikea decor – the well-known Flardfull, Sparsam, Svit and Snorik – needs to be assembled by the householder him- or herself. That’s the whole well-accepted, though frustrating, point of Ikea.

  Mind addled by the move, I didn’t realise that all the other furniture companies have long since followed suit. Perhaps I wouldn’t have agreed that my teenage daughter could have a complete bedroom makeover. Then I wouldn’t be sitting on the bare floor, surrounded by gigantic flat-packs alleged to contain a queen-sized bed, a desk, wardrobe, chair, and chest of drawers.

  There are no light, Swedish-style Grankullas or Dagstorps at Fantastic Furniture. Their stuff is the heavy, solidly named Alpine, Barrington, Bravo, Oakley and Bounty. This is where, if she really cared for me, St Anne would step in. There is no allen key.

  HERB

  I spotted my boyhood hero the other day. I could hardly believe my eyes: there was Herb Elliott, the great miler, standing in the same room at a party, wearing a rustic check shirt and sipping red wine.

  Out of context, he still looked much the same: fit, a bit broader perhaps, a little less hair, but even as a champion schoolboy runner he’d never had much of a thatch. My immediate thought – an odd one, seeing Herb is seventyish now – was what would Percy Cerutty, his famously health-conscious and irascible coach, think of him drinking.

  ‘Look, that’s Herb Elliott!’ I whispered to the people near me. Seeing my old hero not only here in the boondocks, but actually on the premises, I felt naively young and excited. ‘Yes, he lives here now,’ they said. A little smugly. Just another famous person who’d had the good sense to retire to our country town.

  If, aged thirteen, I could have chosen to be anyone else in the world, it would have been Herb Elliott. Swimming’s John Konrads and Lew Hoad of tennis fame came next, with James Bond and Paul Newman close behind, but a fair way back in the field behind Herb. He was a Perth boy, too; I had seen him run – and win, of course – several times.

  On one of the most memorable days of my childhood – the only time my father ever took me to a sporting event – we saw Herb run in a mile thriller at Leederville Oval. My father and I sat on the grassy hillside in the breezy sunshine. The West Australian and Daily News sportswriters had beaten it up as a grudge race: Herb versus his nemesis, the perennial No. 2, Merv Lincoln, and in the beginning it looked like being a close thing.

  Herb led, with that famous easy stride, but not by more than a body’s width. They ran the first three laps close together. That afternoon, however, Merv looked stronger, more aggressive. Coming into the straight, Herb looked to be battling the Fremantle Doctor in the last 100 yards as he fought against the wind.

  Merv seemed to have the race in the bag. But of course Herb gave his famous final kick and, yet again, defeated his shadow. I had never seen my father sitting on the ground before, or looking both relaxed and interested simultaneously. It was an afternoon to remember.

  Herb was never beaten in his career. Because of him I took up middle-distance running. I trained conscientiously; I precisely followed his and Percy’s example. I ate fruit and nuts and wheatgerm. Faithfully imitating a photograph I’d seen of Herb and Percy, I shivered, bare-chested, up and down sandhills before breakfast.

  Eventually I made the interschool team in the mile and 880. At my peak, however, I was just a couple of strides better than average; my best-ever result was third. Herb’s old schoolboy records were safe – and my father’s enjoyment of Herb’s victory mile at Leederville didn’t extend to watching any of my athletic efforts.

  And then came extraordinary news. My grandmother showed me the family tree. Herb’s and my names were both there, on the lower branches. We were cousins a couple of times removed. My great-grandmother was an Elliott, a sister to Herb’s great-grandfather. On a nearby branch was another well-known relative: Sumner Locke Elliott, the author. I’d never heard of him. The only reason I was even faintly interested in this particular connection was because my grandmother had underlined his name, adding mysteriously in the margin, ‘He’s very controversial!’

  I never met Herb. But, twenty-five years later, I did meet Sumner Locke Elliott. By then I knew who he was. Rusty Bugles; Careful, He Might Hear You; Water Under the Bridge: a man with a fine literary record. I told him of the family connection. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘A few years ago a man turned up on my doorstep in New York and announced that we were related. Some runner with the same surname.’

  Sumner was not what you’d call a sports fan. But I wondered if genetics came into this. I was a writer, too. My brother Bill, far exceeding my athletic efforts, became a champion long-distance and cross-country runner.

  Anyway, there I was last week, standing near Herb Elliott at a party. We were both sipping our
first drinks of the evening. I wanted to go up and introduce myself. Tell him of my childhood hero-worshipping, of our family connection. But suddenly I was thirteen again. I was too shy. And by the time I’d drunk enough wine to make an approach possible, he was gone.

  IRENE

  This is an item about a boat. Everyone knows boats have personalities, so at this minute there are a myriad of complex personalities bobbing on their moorings in this town. My favourite boat, a matronly vessel named Irene, has a stronger character than most. If she was human she’d be your aunt or godmother and could be trusted with the children.

  Owned by an old friend, Nelson Mews, Irene resides in Fremantle’s Challenger Harbour, where she stands out from the younger, glossier craft like Meryl Streep in a room full of Kardashians.

  Irene was built in 1942 and worked out of Innisfail, Queensland as a pilot boat for forty years. Nelson’s brother Chris saw her chugging along the Johnson River, and when she retired from Government service, he bought her, cruised her on the Barrier Reef, and then brought her over to Perth by truck. She became the Mews family boat – and this is a family that knows boats more than most – used for birthdays, weddings and river picnics. Chris sold her to Nelson, and he and his wife Julie lived on her for nearly three years.

  Irene is fourteen metres long, weighs twenty tons and draws just over a metre, so she can anchor in shallow river water and allow people to swim ashore. She has a six-cylinder diesel engine which Nelson rebuilt with original parts found in a Lincolnshire warehouse. Two metres have been lopped off her mainmast so she can get under the Fremantle traffic bridge.

  She has a set of steadying sails, but still rolls too much for the family to like going to Rottnest when the Fremantle Doctor is blowing. After a serene day’s picnic on the river, rounding the South Mole into the ocean in the teeth of a thirty-five-knot sea breeze, and then inching into her berth, can be a bracing experience.

  A member of the Classic Boat Club, Irene is built of kauri pine, with teak decks and silky oak for the superstructure. She cruises at twelve knots but is more comfortable at eight. Because she was a working boat, not a millionaire’s motor yacht, she dresses more plainly than her sleek neighbours. In her honest, workmanlike way, however, Irene turns heads at any marina. People stop to admire, like they would an immaculate 1948 Morris Oxford spotted unexpectedly in the Woolworths carpark.

  Six generations of Mewses have built boats in WA since 1830, a year after first settlement, when Thomas William Mews arrived on the Rockingham with his wife Mary and their five children. After travelling halfway around the world, the Rockingham ran aground near its destination. The new settlers spent a miserable winter huddled in the wreckage and thirty-seven of them died.

  Tom and Mary prevailed, however, had two more children, and their descendants went on to build scores of fishing boats, pearling luggers, yachts and river craft in a century and a half of boat-building. The family is commemorated today in both a Fremantle street name and a park on the harbour.

  I remember one of Irene’s guests providing an especially fitting conjunction of boat and person. He was John Major, the former British prime minister. Visiting Perth for business, he and his wife Norma spent a day aboard Irene in February 2004. (The connection was that Nelson Mews was a formidable BBC television political specialist for many years.) I was on board that day and can report that John Major was an amiable guest.

  It had been seven years since he was prime minister but his security in WA was still tight. His two British Secret Service bodyguards were amusing company. As one said to me, gazing across the limpid river estuary while he munched a prawn, ‘Yes, this is a better gig than Ireland and the Middle East.’

  A team of navy divers checked that Irene had no al-Qaeda or IRA bombs on her hull, and she was followed closely upriver all day by a boatload of Federal and State police. Irene’s behaviour was impeccable throughout. She hardly rolled. Indeed, Irene and John Major seemed perfectly suited.

  We dropped anchor at Crawley and John Major talked cricket while he enjoyed a Margaret River sauvignon blanc. Perth let him down in only one respect. On sighting the soccer-ball circumferences and undulating tentacles of the river’s innumerable brown jellyfish, he firmly declined to go swimming.

  CONTACTS

  For years I’d kept putting off the matter of a new address book. Or contact book, as reporters call them. It meant transferring the old entries into a new book, an increasingly melancholy task because I knew some names would not be making the move. Then the tatty old book finally fell to pieces and I had no choice.

  It immediately became clear that my old contacts, whether connected by blood, friendship, lust or work, were not marvellous at sustaining permanent relationships.

  In the two decades of the old book’s existence twenty-two married couples had separated, their joint phone numbers and addresses now more than redundant. Three people had got mainstream religion, two merchant bankers had taken up esoteric forms of Eastern spirituality. Two men had served time, one in a Polish gaol. Five people had become internationally celebrated. One entry was an old silent number for Don Bradman. Other numbers were for directors, dentists and dog-walkers.

  On average, the West Australian entries had become wealthier than the Eastern States ones. At least three contacts were serious alcoholics. Another two had fled overseas. Four Margaret River and Byron Bay types had changed to names of the Moonbeam, Sargasso and Zeus variety. Four people were chronically ill. One man had been deafened in the right ear after being hit with a frozen snapper during a Friday-night pub fish-raffle argument.

  But many other people, for whatever reason, had fallen out of contact.

  All in all, this was rather depressing. The old book suddenly seemed like a Little Black Book in reverse, not an optimistic collection of numbers, but an assemblage of sadness and grumpiness.

  What I’d really been avoiding was contemplating the entries for the family members and friends who’d died during that book’s existence. My uncle Ian, who looked and behaved like the comedian Danny Kaye; in-laws, aunts and cousins; writers and publishers like Dorothy Porter, Hazel Rowley, Helen Daniel, Richard Hall and Glenda Adams, people who’d lived for good writing and died young.

  Eliminating Dorothy Porter’s name was especially saddening. Dot was one of the most vital people I’ve ever met, able to meld poetry and crime-thriller into vigorous fiction. We’d been Aust. Lit. ambassadors together, reading our work to audiences in high-end venues like Cambridge University, and in unlikely Glasgow slums and Blackpool bingo halls, shouting our wares to tiny stony-faced audiences over the bingo callers next door. And laughed about it later, over well-earned late-night drinks, in Fawlty Towers–style accommodation.

  During the address-book changeover I remonstrated with my brother about his dozen address changes over the years. ‘You should talk!’ he said. Then I counted up all the places I’d lived ‘permanently’ since early childhood; it came to thirty-three, in three states and three countries. I’d never considered myself a nomad. As it happened, my new address book approved of my residential habits.

  I should remind younger readers that ‘address book’ refers not to a software database but to a stationery item, a suave black Moleskine address book. Moleskine cocks a proud European snook at modern technology. When I opened the nifty new book, a tasteful pamphlet called ‘The History of a Legendary Notebook’ slid out.

  It announced that their notebooks had been ‘used by artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin’. When Chatwin was leaving for the wilds of Australia to research the book that would become The Songlines, he’d ordered 100 of them, their complete stock.

  The Moleskine notebook, ‘this silent and discreet keeper of an extraordinary tradition’, had long been a symbol of ‘contemporary nomadism’, it asserted. My new address book had such a superior artistic pedigree that a contemporary nomad like myself was probably letting down the side by ente
ring numbers for the computer repairman and pizza delivery.

  Not to mention my most crucial entry: Barry, the septic-tank man. He’s the silent and discreet keeper of an extraordinary tradition, if ever I’ve known one.

  MRS KERFOOPS GOES TO BALI

  I was surprised when Mrs Kerfoops surfaced in Bali the other day. I hadn’t heard of her for many a decade, and suddenly she turned up at the Denpasar airport. I was waiting in the departure lounge when an exhausted-looking Australian woman, searching for a seat, asked another perspiring woman, ‘Who’s sitting there?’ and the second, older woman shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know – Mrs Kerfoops.’

  This took me aback. I looked around, half expecting to finally lay eyes on this mythical Australian matron. (Where was she from again? Yes, Woop Woop, most likely.) There were certainly lots of potential candidates amongst the sturdy and mature female passengers in their tent-like tropical shifts. There is no foreign place with such a high proportion of rampant Australians as Bali. Being such a grandstanding national personality, albeit of yesteryear, Mrs Kerfoops could easily be at home here.

  A ubiquitous character of my parents’ generation, she’d be pretty long in the tooth these days, no spring chicken. When last heard of, during various disapproving exchanges between my mother and father, Mrs Kerfoops was under discussion for such things as complaining loudly at the butcher’s about the standard of lamb chops, wearing an ostentatiously unsuitable hat to town, upsetting the school’s P&C committee, and flirting with the greengrocer. She’d also snubbed my mother on the bus, an event that apparently caused everyone to confuse her with Lady Muck.