HOME TRUTHS: Helen

Created for a time when we’re all spending much more of it at home, Home
Truths is an interview and illustration project that explores the meaning
of ‘home’ from the perspective of eight different women over 70.

Name Helen

Age 75

Lives in Abbotsford

Finish this sentence: Home is … where the possibility of being my true self, and the freedom to please myself, are at their strongest, both seeming to depend on who I’m sharing my home with and how much self-knowledge I have.

 Describe your childhood home

 I spent the first seven years of my life in the double-fronted, brick, Victorian-era, head teacher’s residence next door to the Bacchus Marsh Primary School. In this house I watched my grandmother’s index finger tap along the edge of our wooden kitchen table one breakfast time as she said in response to my exuberance, ‘little children should be seen and not heard.’ In this house I watched my mother weep beside the black telephone on the wall of the dining room after her mother, my grandmother, died in the Bacchus Marsh hospital and I watched as my father put his arms around her. In this house my sister and I stood in the doorway of the kitchen holding one another in horrified support as our father strapped our older brother for the first and only time. Ian had been sent to get a prescription for our grandmother after school and came across some other boys playing cricket. He didn’t get home until after dark. Dad shouted, ‘Don’t ever frighten your mother like that again,’ as he brought the strap down wrathfully – but lightly – on my cowering brother. In this house my sister’s mouth fell open with sympathetic dismay when I scribbled furiously on the wall beside my bed with coloured pencils. The house belonged to ‘The Department’ and we were expected to look after it. Instead of wrath for my appalling crime I was given grace. My parents looked at the scribble and said nothing. In the afternoon my father re-painted the wall.

In summer we lay on our backs behind the house under a huge peppercorn tree that hummed with insect life and gazed up dreamily into its mighty architecture. When I was about four years old and my sister and brother were at school, a swagman walking up from the Lerderderg River stopped by the front gate and lifted his sharp and shiny axe towards me. I fled in terror to my mother who was in the vestibule at the back of the house. While I buried my head in her apron she said, ‘I think he might have only wanted to wave hello to you and didn’t have a free hand.’ No-one lives in the Bacchus Marsh school house anymore. The last time I passed by, it was being used as an art room by the school.

Did you ever have to make a home away from home?

Often. My first such home was a tiny room at Frank Tate House in Dandenong Road, Armadale, a hostel for 80 young women from the country, all studying at Melbourne Uni and Monash on Education Department studentships. I was forced to share the room with a girl from Loreto Convent in Ballarat who went to mass every morning and exuded indifference to what anyone else thought of her – an attitude I thought was likely instilled in her by the independent minded Loreto nuns. The smell of peeled oranges and black tea she consumed every evening while we worked side by side at the desks crammed at the ends of our beds – less than 1.5 meters apart – made me feel sick. Her Catholicism rubbed my Presbyterianism up the wrong way.  At first I went home to Geelong every weekend but, over time, I learned to accept and even enjoy our differences, developing an affection for her that the Greeks called storge. I discovered how affection can flourish in humble, unmerited, un-chosen, day to day contact with someone you at first find impossible to love. 

Where’s home for you?

I live in a three-bedroom apartment located between Victoria Park and the Yarra River. It’s the replacement for a house in Brunswick that bore a striking resemblance to the school houses I lived in for the first 10 years of my life in Bacchus Marsh and Daylesford. My partner and I were looking for a place to live that would be closer to her son and daughter when a long-time friend asked us over for dinner and told us about an apartment in the same complex that hadn’t sold at auction the previous Saturday. Two days later we offered to buy it for the asking price, after a five-minute inspection.

My study overlooks Studley Park. I’m creating an indigenous garden on the river banks below our apartment which I share with passers-by, skink-hunting white faced herons, water dragons, blue tongue lizards, bellbirds and roosting frogmouths. Brown snakes and tiger snakes too, but I’ve never seen one of them while I’ve been gardening. In the garden the idea that the earth is my home presses itself on me.

We practice kicking banana goals on Victoria Park with our grandchildren when they come for sleep-overs, go for long walks through the bush, and hit tennis balls against a couple of the many red brick walls nearby. In this time of the Covid-19 virus, young volunteers who belong to a neighbourhood group based around Victoria Park station collect our telephoned grocery order from the local IGA and bring it to us. And we get a weekly box of food delivered from the Farm Café of the Collingwood Children’s Farm. It’s a privileged existence.

What does home mean to you? 

I need to live with other people. Without someone else in the house my spirits sink so I’ve tried quite a few different ways of sharing my living space with others.

Last year my partner and I visited the London home of Sam Johnson in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street and picked up a fridge magnet that says, ‘To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.’  This quote comes from Johnson’s Rambler essay of 10 November 1750, on the importance of home life. He goes on to say, ‘It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity;’ in the world beyond home, ‘the mind is often dressed for show in painted honour and fictitious benevolence.’ Sam Johnson, a man familiar with deep depression, didn’t live alone either. His friends marvelled at the odd collection of people who found a refuge with him in Gough Square.

C.S. Lewis included Johnson’s ideas about happiness at home in The Weight of Glory and other Addresses, and in the title essay explored the idea that we are restless in this life because we long for a more permanent home. I wrote our desire for a deeper experience of home into my novel, Stone and Star. The central character, Frances McIntyre, has a numinous experience in the middle of a violent storm on the side of Mt Taurus in south-western Tasmania. People who have a numinous experience like hers often report the joy they felt from being at home in the universe.

Do you have any home truths for people dealing with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?  

No. No home truths. I can only attest that the lockdown suits my introverted personality and my ambition to work on a lot of projects, and that it’s likely much harder on those who live alone than it is on me. A woman in our complex who lives alone delivered two baked fruit crumbles to us yesterday and said she longs for the day when she can hug her mother and her friends again. Decontamination processes and Zoom meetings are new elements in my life but I read, write, think, cook, clean, garden, watch films, and sort through my things with a view to discarding what’s extraneous to my needs, much as I always do when I’m not locked down.

If I have a home truth of any kind to offer it’s a hope that none of us will waste the chance to think about how we can help to rebuild a community where everyone has a safe home to shelter in, and enough money to buy food.

Interview: Maria O’Dwyer Illustration: Georgia Perry