In Tasmania (25 page)

‘
I HAVE NOW RECOVERED FROM THE SHOCK OF YOUR PHONE CALL
& would like to thank you so much for being in touch … There are so many things that I would like to ask you that I am hoping you will have the answer for.'

Five days had passed since Ivy had written, enclosing directions to the farmhouse. I drove up the Midlands Highway to Launceston, and west along the coast, past a gigantic white board – ‘Have you missed Ulverstone, the centre of attraction?' From Ulverstone, the road dipped and rose through potato fields and lines of towering macrocarpa, and along the horizon the Dial Range slid away in a sharp band of blue.

The farmhouse lay a mile or two beyond North Motton on the lip of a valley overlooking Gunn's Plains: a neat white weatherboard bungalow set in beds of red carnations and dahlias. Ivy's parents built it after their marriage in 1921 and named it for Hordern's property in England. ‘We're Boode House,' Ivy said on the telephone. ‘They used to use the name, people did.'

There was no car in sight, and it crossed my mind that the sisters had gone out or even forgotten that I was coming. I walked through the neat front garden planted with pink lilies and rapped on a chocolate-coloured door. Silence. I thought, peering through a window, I saw a shadow getting up from a large bed. When I looked again, the room was empty.

The door cracked open. Presently, two tiny old women emerged, in unbuttoned hand-knitted, turquoise cardigans and matching fluffy slippers, and shielded their eyes from the sun. They seemed frail, and I had the impression that if I hugged them they would crackle like two poppadoms.

 

‘It's called the Garden of Eden up here,' Ivy said with pride. ‘Did you see the turn off to Gunn's Plains? It begins round there, Dad reckoned.' She was wiry, with a thin, wrinkled face that made her nose look sharp, and her small eyes more bloodshot. Her hair was long and grey and she wore it parted in the middle in the style of the 1930s.

Maud had a plumper face and smooth straight hair, and appeared agitated.

They led the way down a dark corridor of slot-and-groove walls, past a silver-framed photograph of Lady Diana, in pride of place beside the telephone. Past a bedroom with a cupboard from which ranks of bridal dolls stared down at me through veils. Into a kitchen.

The wood-patterned vinyl wallpaper was hung with plates of young girls with posies in their hair and a ceramic prayer to ‘The Miracle of Friendship', and on the table there were plates heaped with food.

‘How long have you lived in this house?'

‘All our lives,' Ivy said.

‘Except one or two days,' Maud said.

‘How many days?' I asked.

Ivy counted on her fingers. ‘Three weeks for me, near enough. Maudy would be longer. You had a fair while in hospital, didn't you?'

But Maud was keen for us to eat. She poured me a cup of tea and soon I was settling into a plate of spam and a meat-loaf that tasted with the sweetness that comes of being cooked in apricot jam.

‘Not like what we served up when we were all younger, but we can't digest what we used to.'

‘Don't put that there,' Maud said.

‘Oh, sorry,' Ivy said and moved the jug. Then smiled at me: ‘She's too slow and I'm the opposite.' She tapped her tiny head: ‘So far I'm pretty good up here. Like the insurance fella said: “It's in there somewhere, but you've got to get it out.”'

Ivy was impatient to show off the fruit of her research into our common family tree. She darted in and out of the room as I ate, each time returning with a letter or a photograph that she wanted me to look at, finally a sheet of paper six feet square with a forest of names entered in microscopic hand. Beneath the names of my grandparents, it was strange to see my name.

‘We felt we already knew about them before you were in touch. Of course, we are sorry about the sad parts, but seems we all have those.'

Once, she came back holding a calf-bound photograph album. She did not know who the people were. Had I any ideas?

It was the usual thing: studio portraits from the Victorian and Edwardian eras of men with wax-tipped moustaches and women with round, puddingy faces.

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't think so.'

‘They didn't think enough of themselves to write down who they were.
They
know who it is, but what about the next generation?'

After I had eaten, she took me into a little light room adjoining the kitchen. This was the Sun Room, where she had compiled her chart.

There was a framed photographic portrait of a good-looking man dressed in a jacket tight-buttoned at the neck. I had a fleeting impression of intense fiery eyes, a black moustache, a small goatee.

‘That's grandfather Hordern.'

Facing him was a sepia photograph of a substantial ivy-covered country house. It was taken from across a grass tennis court and was of a family gathering on a summer day in the 1890s. Wide open on the ground floor of the house were two sash windows, and beside the court, beneath a parasol, sat a bonneted woman in a black bombazine dress, and two other women. They were watching a young man with a blurred face who wore white trousers and was gripping a tennis racket. The woman in black was Hordern's wife and the two women, I suppose, were probably Hordern's spinster sisters. I was wondering if the blurred figure could be SPB when Ivy said: ‘We reckon your grandfather sent that.'

She knelt by a canvas trunk that her grandfather had lugged halfway across the world. The shipping company had stamped the figure 8 on the outside, and the trunk was fortified with wooden slats and metal hinges, and still had stickers on it:
PLYMOUTH
,
MELBOURNE
,
PASSENGER'S LUGGAGE ULVERSTONE
.

She opened the lid and dipped her little hand underneath. This was where Hordern had stored the things that mattered to him most.

 

Either from this trunk or from another part of the house Ivy brought forth the relics: Hordern's riding crop; his gold and porcupine toothpick; a copy of
Tom Brown's Schooldays
, dedicated to Thomas Arnold's mother and with Hordern's neurotic-looking signature; and
Lorna Doone
in a red binding, dated 1883 and with Hordern's name on the title page in pencil.

Then the trophies. Red rosettes like flattened carnations for his prize bulls. Plus blue cardboard placards.

More photographs: my grandfather's room at Christ Church, in which, above a velvet sofa, hung an oil painting of Lorna Doone; a portrait of SPB's mother sitting surrounded by potted ferns and gazing up at the Reverend Brodie Mais; another large country house – Yarde; a second portrait of Hordern.

The studio photograph was taken several years after the one in the frame. Hordern's tie was loose round his neck, his lips were slightly open, and he had lost his vigour and his hair. His face was turned from the camera and his eyes, downcast, followed the melancholy angle of his moustache.

From near the bottom of the trunk, Ivy drew out a sheet of stiff paper that she unfolded and spread on the floor. A black and red poster announcing the sale at 3 p.m. on June 29, 1900, at the Golden Lion Hotel, Barnstaple, of Boode House – a ‘well-built and conveniently-planned' residence set in 140 acres with a summer house, coach house, conservatory and four-stall stable. And a tennis lawn that, until very recently, had glittered with broken glass.

‘
WE HAVE THOUGHT FOR A LONG TIME THAT YOU DON'T LEARN ABOUT
things until you are meant to,' Ivy said.

I came by a more or less credible, satisfactory version of Petre Hordern's story in part from what Ivy told me and in part from others, and also from what SPB had written about him.

The empty bottles sailing through the open sash windows had presaged the sale of Boode. As a young man, Hordern had modelled himself on John Ridd, the honest yeoman farmer summoned to run the family estate after his father was murdered by the Doones, a family of outlaws living in a moorland valley. But he was more like Anthony Fenn Kemp than John Ridd.

Hordern was 28 when he inherited the two estates; the famous herds that his father had managed for 70 years, ever since he was fourteen; and £30,000. This was a hefty sum, but Hordern spent it briskly, and even had to borrow a further £10,000 from his sisters. ‘He was too good-natured,' Ivy said in his defence. ‘Mum said that he packed up hampers and sent them to people at Christmas. They used to have champagne parties in Boode and if Auntie Ethel behaved she was allowed to the banisters to watch.' Ivy clung to the belief that her grandfather had invested a large proportion of his fortune in cattle-feed.

‘He used to mix with those higher-up ones – like the Kaiser. He used to play tennis with him. We got a book from the library because we weren't sure who the Kaiser was.' Hordern was known as ‘the Lord of Gratton', although Ivy could not explain the reason.

At Boode, there were parlourmaids and cooks and a governess (‘Miss Tatum') for the children. The walls were hung with oil paintings from floor to ceiling. Ivy had a cutting from the
North Devon Journal
of February 13, 1877, a report on Hordern's coming of age for which his father had thrown ‘a grand dinner' for 100 farmers.

But 15 years on, many of the farmers who had toasted Hordern on his 21st birthday congregated in a field adjacent to Boode and watched him raise the hammer at the first of four enforced auctions.

In 1892, he sold a flock of 1,000 Devon Longworth sheep and a whole herd of pure-bred Devon cattle. Another cutting, this one from the
Live Stock Journal
, remarked that Hordern ‘may fairly boast that he possesses one of the best herds of the breed in the kingdom in that with which he is about to part'. The animals included the sire Quartly, winner of Royal Agricultural Show's First Prizes at Shrewsbury and Norwich, ‘a neat, small-boned animal of almost faultless symmetry'.

Three years later, Hordern sold a further 62 pedigree cattle, 788 sheep, 60 pigs and ten horses; and in 1899, a year before he emigrated, he disposed of the balance of his livestock.

The advance notice for this, Hordern's penultimate auction, was the most effusive of the lot. ‘No more noted herd of cattle has come before the public than the old-established one of Mr P. Hordern of Boode.' The prizewinners included Johnny-Come-Quick and Fire-away (‘with regard to this last bull a competent critic has declared that there is not a weak point in him'). News of the auction of 96 ‘superb Devon beasts, including all the prizewinners' spread rapidly to the country's prominent breeders, among them Queen Victoria, who sent a representative to bid for a bull called Joy. But competition was keen and Her Gracious Majesty, said the
North Devon Journal
, lost out to the President of the Devon Cattle-Breeders Association, and was obliged to content herself with Hordern's two sires, Peace and Plenty. ‘I have never seen a better lot of stock,' remarked Hordern sorrowfully in the course of an excellent lunch.

Joy went for 45 guineas; Curly, a famous milker, for 25; and Johnny-Come-Quick for 21. But the auction – and the cheers that were called for him – did nothing to improve Hordern's situation. At the age of 43 he was broke and disgraced. There was only one option left. ‘He was too much imbued with the spirit of his class to hesitate in the choice of his next step,' Somerset Maugham wrote of Warburton, a character in one of his stories. ‘When a man in his set had run though his money, he went out to the colonies.'

‘
WHY TASMANIA?
'
I ASKED IVY.

‘He was reading things, Mum said. It sounded nice. He used to study it.'

It was not too hard to piece together the books that Hordern might have studied. He knew several families in Devon who had been hounded out of England by the weather and drawn to Tasmania by the eulogies of Anthony Trollope. In
Australia and New Zealand
(1873), the novelist had fondly characterised Tasmania as a listless Sleepy Hollow and its people as slumbering Rip Van Winkles, being eaten out of house and home by rabbits imported from Europe. And yet Trollope's admission that if he had himself to emigrate he would choose Tasmania encouraged a flotilla of English settlers, including his cousin the Reverend William Trollope (who ended his days in Kempton of all places, and was buried against the east wall of Kemp's church). ‘It is acknowledged even by all the rival colonies that of all the colonies Tasmania is the prettiest,' Trollope had written. ‘It is a Paradise for a working man as compared with England.'

Another text was
My Home in Tasmania, during a residence of nine years
. Its author Louisa Meredith had stayed with friends of Petre Hordern in Devon ten years before. She may have planted in his mind the notion of Tasmania as a destination.

Meredith was a Birmingham poet and the niece of Kemp's friend George Meredith. She had married Meredith's son – her first cousin Charles – and in 1840 settled near Swansea in a house on her uncle's estate. He also owned the land on which our house stood. While living on the East Coast, Louisa Meredith had gathered material for her book, in which she observed the transforming effect that moving to the opposite end of the world had had on some emigrants she had met there, particularly those in abruptly reduced circumstances: ‘Here, removed from the first crushing grief of disgrace, and seeing before them the prospect of rising again, and of building for themselves a new character above the ruins of the old, all the latent good in them springs into action.'

Did Hordern remember these words as his creditors swarmed? The role of bankrupt squire cannot have been easy to conduct with élan. And it is possible that Meredith had further pricked his curiosity by mentioning the Castra settlement: a scheme in which her husband Charles Meredith had been involved, to create a utopia in Tasmania's north-west for retired Indian Army officers.