Some people have a lot of friends and some, for reasons no one can explain, do not. My mother could make friends the way a dog collects fleas while I must have the equivalent of an inbuilt flea collar. The fact that she brought me up, taught me how to interact socially with people through her example, was friendly, charming and engaging, all things I naturally emulated just as one does the language you learn at home, mattered not one whit. I did not make friends easily.
Even so I had plenty of company even though I was an only child. Two of my cousins lived two doors away, there was another family with three children one house down again, no fences and plenty of room to play. Added to this at five years of age I must have told my parents about a girl I met and got on with at school. The next thing she was brought around to play and joined our neighborhood group. She lived barely a kilometer away and we've been friends ever since. Now, however, like my cousins, she lives in another state or, rather, I live in another state.
From the age of ten I was sent to a weekly boarding school and only managed to see my friends on weekends. We all went to different schools but would gravitate together on the weekend due to our proximity and the fact that our families were friends. My school friend would go her own way sometimes and, as we became teenagers, that became more often but still we prevailed. At high school I was friendless. I loathed the school and did not fit in. When I finished there I said goodbye to no one and didn't look back. Perhaps I just didn't have good friend making skills and, not learning them, this affected me throughout my life.
As I grew to adulthood and married, I moved away from the state and, each place we lived, I tried to make friends. It wasn't easy and quite often we lived in areas for my husband's work that were quite different from the social background that I'd known growing up and, I confess, that came as a shock. I had lived in something of a privileged environment. Then, when the job finished, we'd up stakes and leave. After three moves interstate, making some ties, then moving overseas and making more ties, then back and two more interstate moves and a divorce, I had made a number of connections and some friends. I'm very fond of some of those people but they are now far away and some also divorced.
Happily my son was eleven when we, my husband, son and I, settled here prior to our divorce and my son has inherited my mother's stunning ability to make friends. This has gladdened my heart. He is now forty two and still keeps in touch with most of his school friends.
By the time I settled in Queensland I was, frankly, tired of trying to make new friends. I joined a tennis club and tried for a while but the women were a pretty tight knit group and, after thirty, it just gets harder to break in. There is also something to be said for the fact that you are more like the people from the place from which you originate. I realized this recently when I managed to contact a younger cousin to whom I hadn't spoken for fifteen years. She was the younger of the two cousins who lived in my neighborhood. Fifteen years just compressed into nothing in moments. We talked for two hours and I realized how very alike in mind, speech and attitudes we were, even though we are two unique individuals. It was like going home again.
Most of my relatives remained in Sydney so I'm very much a foreigner now and feel very distant from my roots, even though I'm only one thousand kilometers away. I'm like a transplanted plant. I've acclimatized but my roots belong elsewhere. My cousins' children don't even know me and I find that sad.
Close friends would have helped but I have none here. I do have my partner, a man I met twenty five years ago. We are more like companions now but he is my rock. I also have a male friend whom I see regularly. I seem to get on better with men for some reason but that's okay. My childhood friend from school and I see one another once a year or so but don't phone as frequently now. I see my son and his family regularly and, as my parents have passed away, that's it. Before Covid I worked and met many people, which filled the friend gap, but now, as it has for all of us, life has shrunk.
It's made me think of one remarkable part of my childhood and youth. It was a place that brought all kinds of people into my universe and filled my life. It was the Hut.
I have to explain about the Hut. It was built on my parents' property by my uncle, my mother's brother, for him and his wife to live in while he built a house on the land next door. Eventually his new house was two doors down because my grandfather, my mother's father, asked my father to subdivide his land so he could build beside us. He had previously owned and built on the land in front of us, which was lower than our land, but my grandmother died and he sold the house and moved then regretted it later and wanted to move back. Both the houses, as well as his earlier house, had a magnificent water view and this was one of the draw cards that brought so many people to want to come and stay in the Hut.
The Hut comprised one large living and bedroom space, a kitchen and a bathroom. Outside it was weatherboard with a pitched fibro roof and inside was plasterboard walls and a ceiling that was probably plasterboard or something but in which bush rats would leave macadamia nut shells and also reside along with the occasional python. The building had an entrance door with two steps leading up to it and a side door that came off the small hallway between the kitchen and bathroom.
If my parents had charged people to stay in the Hut, I might have been left a rich woman. My childhood up to my early twenties were full of people who made the pilgrimage to our beautiful and welcoming surrounds. Our house was a big brick post war house, more modern than those of my other cousins who lived in Mosman. Their houses were smaller and of a more purple brown brick that I hated. They had fences and no views. My house was spacious, red brick with a picture window in the living room that looked out over Pittwater and, off the living room, was a verandah where my parents had barbeques. These were sit down affairs and Dad would barbeque a scotch fillet that had been cut into steaks. With this would be served jacket potatoes with sour cream, Mum's version of a Ratatouille, a Three Bean salad and sometimes bread rolls. Wine and beer would accompany all this. I was allowed small amounts of wine from the age of twelve presumably because I had a French godmother.
When I was fifteen, Dad decided to have a swimming pool built and, after that, basically every weekend became like a party. While not actually a party, although we had a quite a few, the whole neighborhood always gravitated to the pool, which had no fence in the beginning and a two meter drop on one side. There were no small children in the area by that time, no one ever fell off the edge and our Labrador, an avid swimmer, knew where the steps were where she could get out so we never had to worry about her.
The same year the pool was built a tragedy befell us. My uncle next door died from a massive coronary at the age of forty six leaving a widow and my two cousins, one my age, the other seven years younger. My aunt, however, was stoic and determined to give her children a happy life. The cousin my age loved sailing and my aunt was always holding parties for the young sailing fraternity which tended to spill over to our house. At this stage the Hut also sprang to life as a secondary party place. These were nice parties, supervised by parents, with food and also some alcohol was allowed as we grew older. For an only child, I had it pretty good.
The Hut, however, was usually more a place of residence or short stays for other people from my earliest years. My parents would sometimes allow people they knew to live there for a while, no rent required, when they were stuck for a place to live or building one. When Dad was still a journalist, a female work colleague who needed a place to stay, occupied it for a couple of months as I remember. She was a very glamorous woman and I don't know her story, but she was just taken to the family's bosom. My mother was very accommodating.
I think now that my parents probably needed to keep a roster as there was a continual flow of their friends and family coming to stay at the Hut on weekends. I just took it all in my stride. My father's sister would often come for weekends and stay in a bedroom in our house as she was widowed and alone. Sometimes this would be when the Hut was occupied, sometimes not. Her son lived there with his first wife for some months, rent free. He went on to two more marriages but that was later. While he and his new wife lay in bed there one morning, one of the possums that also made the roof their home, gnawed its way through the ceiling and, the two of them on waking, saw a little black nose and two beady eyes staring at them through a little hole.
The Hut became my grandfather's final home before he went into a nursing home. After selling the house he had built between our house and my uncle and aunt's he moved on again, twice more as I remember. His sister lived with him at that stage and helped look after him as he became an invalid but she died and he came back again. My parents hired a nurse, who became like a friend to them, and she came to care for him every day for some years. My father put an electric bell into the hut and connected it to the house so he could call for help at night. Eventually and sadly he went into care.
A couple of years later I even lived there with my husband for some months after we were married. I didn't like it nearly as much as the house as it didn't have the same view, but I think my mother had wanted to get rid of me for years and I wasn't as welcome in the house anymore. My mother had a kind of two headed llama attitude to me. Sometimes she liked me and sometimes she didn't. There was no particular reason, in fact I don't think she had really wanted me but she did a pretty good job of hiding it until I was married.
Improvements had been made to the Hut even before I was married. The wall between the kitchen and living area was opened up by half. It still covered the kitchen bench plus a bit and the kitchen had been modernized as had the bathroom. The bathroom comprised a shower, toilet and basin but a new lining had been put in and the shower now had a flexible shower hose. I decided to put tiles on the kitchen bench and it looked really good. Little did I know that I would fully renovate a cottage in the bay side suburb of Mount Martha in Melbourne in the next year of my marriage.
After we left, further improvements were made when my parents hired my father-in-law, a builder, to add a large verandah to the water view side of the hut. The inside was also relined. While it was never a building of beauty on the outside, it became pretty snazzy inside. People on the North Shore of Sydney were not pretentious and I hope they have remained the same. Their houses didn't need to be spectacular as they just blended into the hillsides surrounded by a mass of vegetation. The outside of the Hut was always an olive green that blended into the tropical bush surroundings.
After we moved interstate, the neighbor with the three children who lived beside my cousins gave my parents a shingle to hang on it. It had come from her and her late husband's hardware store and it said: The Lodge. My parents hung it on the outside of the Hut but I was not happy about it. The Hut was the Hut and always would be to me and is what everyone called it.
To my utter regret my parents sold the property when I was in my thirties and living in Perth and then they moved to Western Australia as well. If I'd had the money I would have bought the house. To this day my heart breaks at the thought of it. For thirty years some other family has lived in the home in which I was conceived and which I love as if it is part of me. I hope they treasure the place and that no developers ever ruin it or the places around it. I imagine the present owners probably think of the Hut as the Lodge. I know it is still there. I've checked on Google Earth.
Although I lost the house that I never owned as it was my parents, I wonder if I could go back. In part your home is not just a place but a time and that time was so full that it could never be relived or replaced. I am just so immensely grateful that I grew up in a place of such physical natural beauty, which had so many people passing through it. Not many people get so lucky and it certainly helps me to deal with the far more solitary life I lead now. To put it the best way I can: I had it all.
END
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