​The chosen

Memory stirred with the sweet tang of spent ash in the grate. A smell we both loved from childhood. Then, there was the piano, burr walnut with brass sconces. Just like my grandmother’s; she had given it to me ten years before she died. Who had played this one? What music had once filled this house? I could move Grandma’s piano here, put it in the same place. Play it again even.

The bathroom had an ancient claw-foot bath with tin surround, much like the hood of a pram. Was that rust in the bottom where the white enamel had worn away? That’s the first thing I would fix! Could not put my feet in that every time I needed a shower.

There were so many reasons not to buy this place. We drew up two columns headed ‘pros’ and ‘cons’. We knew, Nick and I, that this was a sensible way of making big decisions. It was a very old house after all. Careful consideration now might avoid deep regret down the track. The ‘pros’ were just three things: the garden, lots of rooms so we could each have a study, and privacy. On a hill, surrounded by trees and at a distance from roads and neighbours, we could go out to the clothesline in our pyjamas. And I did love gardening.

The ‘cons’ ran in the left hand column for three A4 pages. Each one could be countered with an instant solution.

The weatherboards were grey with age and window sills ravined with cracks. ‘ We could paint them by the end of the year,’ I announced - fiercely. Goal oriented as always! In those days I had no idea of how much preparation old boards needed. You just had to stir the paint, load up the brush and away you went, didn’t you? Jumbles of loose brick pillars on bare earth pretended to be stumps holding up bearers beneath walls. We would fix them first! (After the bath.) Yes, it was grass growing between the chimney bricks, no doubt loosening the mortar. My first gardening job would be on the roof! Rusted gutters choked with cypress needles ... verandah boards bounced. The house was not exactly unliveable, was it?

In the paddock beyond the garden fence stood a collection of corrugated iron outbuildings. Red oxide walls camouflaged a sea of rust. Inside - and we could only peep through doors half hinged - these sheds were crammed with one hundred years of accumulation: weatherboards, floor boards, window frames, old washing machines, bath tubs, rakes, tractor parts, cupboards, draught horse harnesses, armchairs, enamel basins, milk cans, horseshoes and a milking stool. As long as we could live in the house, we could deal with all that later, couldn’t we?

In some ways our decision made no sense, but perhaps, when we had walked into The Pines on that hot February day, something had indeed awoken a memory. Was it the apple tree guarding the front door ? The jasmine trailing over the verandah posts ? Or had it been the bang of the flywire door behind us, then the dark, cool hallway ... What drew me here? The presence of somewhere else, long-forgotten, but abiding here.

We waited a while to announce the decision we had already made. ’Mum, we’ve bought a house.’ A pause. Had she heard me? ‘We’ve bought a house.’ ‘Well, I just don’t know what to say,’ came the reply, candid as always, but laden with a disappointment she couldn’t disguise even over the phone. She would never live in an old house if she could help it. And why I had left a perfectly good one, as well as a marriage, to live there, she could not understand. Her views were clear. My mind was made up. But despite her misgivings she soon mellowed, a little, and sent me an old black and white photo that ‘just might explain things’.

The photo showed a weatherboard house, just like The Pines sitting proud on a rise, surrounded by garden and fruit trees. It had the same asymmetrical profile, the same return verandah and pitch in the roof, brick chimneys, just one less. I recognised it immediately. It was my great-grandparents’ home in Diamond Creek where I had lived as a toddler while my parents waited for their own home to be finished in Wattle Park, then on the edge of suburban Melbourne. Back then, just after the war, it took a few years to build a house. Already warm memories had eroded any veneer of objectivity I may have had.

I always loved my mother’s stories of struggling in the Depression, the war and beyond. I suspect Mum often used those stories as a way of telling me how easy my own life had been, but I loved them all the same. Stories of how in those days of shortages and rationing she had made my baby blankets from odd scraps, patched together. ‘At Diamond Creek I had to boil the nappies in the copper outside, I could never get them dry. You’d find them in the morning on the line, all frozen, like panes of glass.’ Crammed into their single room was the double bed, my cot that served as a play pen during the day, a piano that my father played every night. Chopin, Schubert, ‘To A Wild Rose’ must have filled my dreams. In the corner of the room was a fireplace where once a possum had climbed down the chimney. My father had dispatched it with a metal torch. ‘He was trying to protect his little girl,’ Mum explained, without apology. She still had that torch with its dint on the side. It still worked.

Here at The Pines was another place of stories, a place ripe with them. The promise of their unfolding held me and despite its obvious age and dilapidation - or perhaps because of it? - we began to imagine a life there. A house of many rooms; I could imagine each of us writing away in our own study. Spaces to garden, to grow fruit trees. Plant native trees. One hundred years ago we would have been surrounded by the Great Forest of South Gippsland. No trace of it now, but perhaps we could put some of it back.

​

We had looked around at other places, but always came back to The Pines. There was something about it. It had character, as they say. A history glimpsed; more questions than answers. It was a place we had chosen, but had also chosen us. It held out the promise of a new life together.