LIFE OF BRINE By PHIL JARRATT
A HOUSE is not a home, someone wiser than me once said, and trite as it might seem, you tend to forget that until you find yourself farewelling a place that has meant far more than bricks and mortar, fibro and tile.
And it doesn’t have to be that special to find a place in your heart. My earliest memories are framed by the falling down, paint-peeled walls of a weatherboard nightmare wedged between the PMG substation and the picture show on a busy section of Highway 1. Every room leaked and the back half of the house stank like the well that divided the laundry from the kitchen. The thunderbox dunny was a long scary walk down into the bowels of the backyard where rats lived in the woodpile and ticks in the convolvulus, and if you got caught short of a Thursday morning, the dunny man would stand outside the door and whistle a tune until you’d finished. (He was a gentleman, and Dad would leave a tallie of Resch’s Pilsener next to the pan for him on the pick-up day before Christmas.)
Despite its manifest failings as a shelter, I loved that place and cried like a baby (I was a man of nine at the time) when our family climbed a rung on the social ladder and moved into a cream brick McMansion with a view over the steelworks. The summer of 1960-61 was just ending and I made the excuse that I was compiling a scrapbook of the brilliant West Indian cricket tour and had to spend hours after school ferreting through the pile of old newspapers in the laundry before the demolition boys moved in. But what I really did down there in what my mum described as “the house from hell” was I paced around the rooms, feeling the tongue and groove, remembering the conversations, the laughter, even the fights, Mum pretending to pack a bag and sitting on the front porch waiting for a bus to take her away from us kids, hearing the tinkle of the piano in the front room where my sisters played duets, and Dad lost the 1955 election to Rex Connor. I moved from room to room in the empty old house, the only home I’d ever known, sobbing.
There was no sobbing last Sunday as our extended family gathered to bid farewell to a humble abode we’d called home for less than a decade, but there were a couple of tears and a lot of memories rekindled as we swam in the skinny lap pool one last time, took selfies, toasted the past and the future in austerity champagne, and took clippings of the frangipani that we’d planted in Nanny and Pa’s ashes.
We bought it as a family investment while living overseas, then when we came back we found something appealing about it, like the funky little beach houses that surrounded us in California, bought the kids out, got our mate Jude the miracle worker to design a reno that let the light in, turned the backyard into a fun zone and moved in.
Like me when I left the house from hell kicking and screaming because it held all my memories, our grandkids have known no other framework for us, their Ma and Poppie. A few tiny rooms in the burbs with a tiki bar and pool out the back, surf photos on the walls and Hawaiian print cushions on the lounges. Ma’s workroom in the garage, Poppie’s writing room at the far end of the house where he can’t be disturbed unless a wicket falls or it’s cocktail hour somewhere. That was about the sum of us, and now it’s not.
It’s funny how the houses you live in can bookend your life, but I got over leaving the house from hell in my first childhood and I know I’ll get over leaving this one as I enter my second. Having a perfectly good alternative venue for the next chapter helps, but also knowing that the new owners seem to love it as much as we do is a comfort.
We started with a cliche, so let’s end with one, as the actress said to the archbishop, and at the end of the day, will be the best result for all going forward. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. It’s true. You can take a clipping to the next place, but some things remain planted there.
