This is ridiculous. Earlier this week, as I packed up our beach shack (aptly named 'The Hut') to return to Melbourne, I caught myself thinking, ‘I won’t come down again. Leaving hurts too much.’
It’s not as though I don’t go there often, maybe not as often as I’d like, but often enough that it should be a routine experience. Packing the place up, though, doing the final clean (that inevitably seems to take forever, whether you’ve been there for three weeks or overnight – sand in every corner, ashes blown from the open fire coating every horizontal surface, little muddy paw prints winding their way from the only door over the kitchen tiles) wrenches me badly. It’s nostalgia on steroids. It bloody well hurts.
I’m not a person who goes around carrying complicated grief for her mother. Mum died wonderfully well, she had a rich life, we sorted out unfinished business before she died. When I’m at The Hut, though, is when her absence in my life over the past 17 years is most painful.
Mum hated leaving there too. ‘Why would you live in Melbourne?’ she’d say, as we locked the door and drove away. When we were little, in India, she sometimes said, ‘I so wish I could see you on the beach at Anglesea’. At that point in our lives, living in Australia was never on the agenda; how it would have surprised and delighted here were she to be told that she would end up with two Australian sons-in-law and seven Aussie grand-children, all of whom have spent holidays and weekends at The Hut their whole lives.
Photos of my ancestors line the aged pine walls of The Hut, which is coming up for its one hundredth birthday. Parents, grand-parents and great-grand-parents look benignly down as we sit by the open fire, reading our books, chatting, eating and drinking and playing interminable card and board games.
This it the place where I am most aware of my forbears and my link with them. I’ve never been that interested on genealogies; at The Hut I feel my ancestors all around me as I inhabit the house and block that they created and that has barely changed in the century it has been sheltering our clan.
It is the only place that was a constant in mum’s family – the Heyers and the Patons. The Patons, particularly, were a family of ministers and missionaries. They lived all over the world, they moved from church house to church house, from mission field to mission field and back ‘home’ again, they had no money. This was the closest they came to a family home, to an ancestral seat. The ashes of an aunt and uncle are scattered on the block, it is the final resting place for our dogs, mum is buried in the lovely, rustic graveyard at nearly Bellbrae. We celebrated the first wedding in our family there less than a year ago.
My dad and my husband – both clergy handymen – married into this. Alistair sometimes quips that he married me for the Hut, and certainly over five decades dad and then Al have kept the house alive with constant maintenance, fixing, tinkering, mending, and, more recently, wholesale renovations. My sister and her husband pour in the support so that, although seventy years ago a builder told my granny that they house was about to fall down, it still stands, looking much the same but stronger than ever and as well-used as it has ever been.
When I leave, I feel the weight of memory and belonging and grief. I wish mum were around to enjoy The Hut being so full of life. I have such a vivid sense of mortality. Not usually one to experience nostalgia over the past, I am struck by how recently we were there with four tiny kids and how they are now adults. It is where I have the clearest sense of my own ageing. Soon, it seems, I too will be an old photo on the wall, and my kids will be telling their grand-children about me.
In an era when so many are fleeing their homeland, we are blessed, those of us who have the constancy of places. Owning a loved home is such a privilege. Last year one of my dearest friends sold the house he grew up in. It had been in his family for over seventy years and he threw a party to celebrate the house and all the people it had nurtured and sheltered over seven decades. A crowd gathered, ate and drank, shared memories and tears and laughter – it was a funeral for a home, a wake for a house – entirely appropriate, heart-warming, community-strengthening and unforgettable.
If we ever had a wake for The Hut, what stories it could tell! I hope it never comes to that. Meanwhile, I keep going down there and cleaning up and leaving again and experiencing that almost piercing pain of loss, gratitude, grief and awareness of the passing of the years.