Past lives of a house

When we first bought our house, and were feeling exuberantly pretentious about it all, we banged on about giving ‘her’ a name.  We decided on Gypsy Rose or Olive Martini.  I’d forgotten about all that nonsense until today.

The house is very much like a glamorous Swanson-like film star, faded in an old lipstick and face powder sort of way but with great presence.  A friend described the house as ’swellegant’ and it is particularly true once you have stepped into her skin and bones.

In some ways we feel as if the original and only owners, prior to us, Kathleen and John, were minding this old art-moderne steamship (she has many curves, double swing kitchen diner doors, and portholes) until we were able to come on board and take up her custodianship. She has also provided us with some adventure and insights into the past.

The reason I am reminded of all of her previous whiskey-sour bar allure and cigarette-smoke elegance today is due to the latest momento we have uncovered in the pantry.  Gypsy occasionally throws up relics and glimpses of old times. Actually, the most recent find is far from elegant at first glance.

I found junket.  I had to ask what it actually was.  Doesn’t sound elegant or like a something a french-rolled dame (I mean that in a pulp fiction sense) in velvet and diamonds would serve up.  It’s all in the name though.  Merry Widow.  Aha, the manufacturers might as well have called the junket “Farewell my Lovely’.  That’s  right, the previous minders of the house stocked the most exquisitely packaged fake foodstuff named after something that sounds like it’s from a Dashiell Hammett short story.  I though we had cleaned Gypsy out (or should it be Barbara after la Stanwyck in Double Indemnity) very well but many things are hidden in this house only to be uncovered at odd moments and offer us an insight into the lives of a swellegant 1940s, 50s, 60s Melbourne housewife and her shaker-mover Rotarian husband.

I love the old black and white ghosts and their worn and feathery keepsakes, as well as their touches of old-world glamour (gotta see the bar and inbuilt clock) and moderne mod-cons.  What’s that line:  The past is a different country, they do things differently there.

Merry Widow junket - let me stick my finger down my throat

Beefcake photo

American name, Melbourne made

San Fran 70s sticker

Letter on hotel stationary left in the loo paper dispenser

The omelette machines

These things……

just made these things….

We’ve been complaining for weeks about the lack of eggs and wanted those feathery chooks to work for their supper.  J found four teeny eggs nestled into the straw potato patch this afternoon where the chickens have free rein.  In fact, today Nellie and Ivy were encroaching Peta and Ginger’s porch space which created a lot of angst in Peta especially.  There was a lot of shooing and shouting.  I realise now the two girls (of the poultry variety) were just trying to tell the other two girls (of the pig-tailed variety) about their  eggs.

We’ve also  started to complain about the low yield from our garden.  We want maximum harvest, thank you very much, out of this plot.  Two tomatoes today. I’m still waiting on beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, capsicums.  The kale and celery have come through and the lettuce has now gone to seed.  Beetroot and carrots are getting vibrant.  Watermelon looks ill. The blood orange and lemon tree look so-so but there are small unripened green fruit.

Winter at our place

Cold breath and frozen toes first thing in the morning. Fragrant stews and mash for tea and quibbled eggs for breakfast. Cuddly doonas and languid soft toys in bedroom mounds. Splattered gum boots lounging at the back and front door. Wispy pea shoots and hopeful broccoli leaves stretching to the winter sun. Wet and leafy walks at the rolling scrubby parkland. Guileless mushrooms poking out among the orange and teak coloured carpet of leaf debris. Lots of indoor play with wooden blocks underfoot, newborn dolls and vintage prams, spinning tops, teasets, puzzles, and dressups as genies and astronauts. Watercolour paint brushes held with fierce determination and secret inner minds. Learning letters with gorgeous back-to-front intensity and stubby pencils, courtesy of dad’s early morning tutorials. Sunday swimming lessons, anxious and tricky, and gleeful too. Riding the bike through fog and damp hills on a bicycle built for three, to Italian classes.

Don’t worry, we don’t pick those mushrooms up at the parkland even though nonna has given us tips to recognising the good ones. A sprightly dog-walker told us the trick is to fry one up with onion and if it goes black, the mushies are to be avoided. I’m not so game to take that as the foolproof method.

Winter in our new ‘old’ house this year has been illuminating in lots of ways. The bones of the house are slowly being restored with some thought to crumbly gutters and drought ridden soils but the winter chill has introduced us to frigid drafts that push their way in from weary cracks and unsealed window frames. The days, and especially the mornings and evenings, test our endurance for the solitary 70s gas-heater in the living room and exhaustless kitchen range. All our large appliances rattle and have lost elasticity in their hinges so that the oven and grill do not seal properly. The worst of it occurs most evenings when the kitchen windows swelter from a soup of cooking condensation. Ginger decides it’s a great canvas for her smiley people faces.

This past couple of months, the garden has been ripped mostly of its defective stormwater drains and invasive plants. It’s given an excuse to stake out a vegie plot that nonna has tackled with muddy determination. Our sophisticated recycled system (me collecting rinse water in a square bucket) has provided litres of the good stuff for all the thirtsy seedlings. We have silverbeet, tiny lettuce buds, cauliflower, peas, leeks, spinach, peppers, parsley, oregano, coriander. J—- has set up a stubborn timber compost bin for all our scraps and vacuum dust. The parkland has not escaped our green thumbs (insert *snorts* here.) We have spent a Sunday planting native trees and grass with lots of community folk.

Today, after breakfast, Ginger and Peta sat playing quietly near our front bay window. I heard stifled giggles. I eventually came upon a bloated funny looking Peta. She was wearing her striped one piece bonds suit pyjamas. With Ginger’s help she had undone her press studs and both girls were stuffing her full of Brio building wooden blocks. Laughing uproariously they had managed to squeeze in about 100 pieces. She looked like an overweight midget sumo wrestler. Couldn’t stand due to all the bulking up in her middle body area. They weren’t able to do up her press studs again. Lucky. She had poo’d in her nappy but was too happy with the stuffing exercise to notice that.

There’s also lots of singing this winter as Ginger’s squeaky vocal cords hit new hi’s and lo’s. Ginger has taken to belting out “48 crash Like a lightning flash like a silk sash bash”. I don’t remember lyrics at all, so she takes after J—-. Forgive me Suzi Q, if I have those lyrics wrong. Peta sings “I’m a little teapot” in a sotte voce ramble a la Marilyn Monroe that leaves us all giggling. Other songs are sung with their own unique arrangements: I, I, I, I’m not your stepping stone; Daydream believer……; She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ginger has also claimed that she has to sing the part of all the Beatles wives, whatever that means, because she likes backing vocals. Oh Ging, it’s really not a man’s world, it isn’t.

The girls argue constantly over who is singing that Beatles song over and over in the car: John Lennon or Poo Maarcardtee. Peta holds her own and is indignantly insistent every time Ginger nominates John as the singer. She also cries out for one song in particular singing out “Nudding gonnachangemywood” over and over again:

Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting through my open mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Its “Across the Universe” by the Beatles available on the Rarities compilation.

And in case you were wondering, quibbled eggs are merely scrambled eggs in Ginger-speak.