In Tasmania (30 page)

ON ONE OF MY VISITS, IVY AND MAUD TOOK ME DOWN THE HILL TO
see Hordern's grave in North Motton.

The cemetery was reached past a weatherboard house. A luminous skeleton dangled against the window and over the fence a polo match was going on. Hordern's was the first grave we came to, a grey slab of weathered marble set on a concrete plinth. Some of the lead letters spelling his name had been removed or bent back by young fingers. His name in its final misspelling read: DERN.

‘Real young tinkers!' snorted Ivy, ashamed not to have come here in a while.

Nettles grew along the side of the grave which abutted a red granite memorial to Hordern's wife, who had died in 1939.

There was a whinny and from over the fence a piebald head looked at us. Glancing back at Hordern's gravestone, I saw that the absent metal letters exposed a pattern of nail holes like woodworm. A jack-jumper ant crawled over his age – he was 63 – and disappeared into the nettles.

‘When did he die?'

Ivy, the archivist, retrieved the date from her head. ‘He died on August 16, 1918.'

‘Mum – did she go to the funeral?' Maud asked.

‘I think she couldn't. She was working at the post office.'

‘How did he die?'

Ivy ripped off a nettle. ‘With the drink, wasn't it? He asked Granny to forgive him before he died, for what he'd done to her, losing her that money and what they had to do coming out here. He must have died a happy man to be forgiven, and then he must have died a horrible death.'

‘Cirrhosis?'

‘That's right. He was like that before he ever got in with Granny. He only drank milk when he used to go courting her. Didn't want her to know, I suppose. It was the life they lived. You know those rich people, you start socially – and then …'

Another of Ivy's relatives was partial to alcohol. ‘I said: “Send her up to us. She wouldn't have time to drink.”'

 

I dug out the edition of the
North-West Advocate
for Saturday, August 17, 1918.

There is nothing like reading a newspaper on the day after a death to remind you that life goes on; that the skeleton in the cupboard is also a jumble of harmless bones. The local temperance branch meeting had decided to form a Band of Hope. The North Motton tennis club was seventeen shillings and fourpence in credit for the season. The film
The Great Secret
was playing at the Majestic Theatre in Devonport. And a new advertisement: ‘Worms: the children's enemy'. Comstock's Dead Shot worm pellets were a safe, sure and reliable remedy in the shape of a lolly and children could take them without hesitation. Plus of course Vitadatio: ‘You may publish this as you think fit … I never felt better than I am today.'

In North Motton church, the Honour Roll committee had met to organise the unveiling ceremony for the 14 men who had passed into the Great Beyond, and to plant memorial trees. At the ceremony on August 29, the Reverend R. H. Roberts urged parents whose sons had fallen not to sorrow because with them it was not night but the morning of Glory (applause). After the singing of ‘God Bless Our Splendid Men', an old soldier got up to say that the lion was stirring and would soon give the Kaiser all the fight he wanted. Not a mention of Hordern.

Up until a few months before, I had never heard of Hordern. But it upset me to think that this distant relative had died utterly forgotten, not even his religious wife seeing fit to mark his passing with a notice. Out of habit, I went back through the newspapers for the month prior to his death. The very least I could do was to try and put his final days into context.

As he lay dying, Hordern's neighbours were preoccupied with a blackberry pest that was spreading up the Leven at such an alarming rate that they had formed a Pest Committee and raised almost £600 to eradicate blackberries. The amount matched the value of Hordern's worldly possessions: his lands, goods, chattels, rights and credits not exceeding in value ‘the sum of £592'.

Hordern had not merited an obituary. All the same, the old stockbreeder in him might have appreciated the lamentation in all quarters that greeted the passing of the mammoth Tasmanian bullock Stock and Hand, who had died of tick disease shortly before appearing at a show in Queensland (‘he was fattened to the limit'). The weather, too, I thought, would have reminded him of home. The worst gales in twenty years had felled the wall of the Gaiety Theatre in Zeehan, blocked roads, killed stock and caused three inches of snow in Paradise. ‘There is a decided “nip” in the atmosphere.'

And not looking for it, I found it. I was reading about the progress of the War – ‘Never before in the world's history has so much been at stake …' – when my eyes strayed, and there, sandwiched between advertisements for Mount Lyell manure and a Russian hair restorer, was the name of my great-great-uncle.

He had died a month earlier than Ivy had thought. Swallowed into Fitzroy's crack.

BRODIE WAS ON THE BATTLEFIELD IN FRANCE. HE WROTE TO HIS
brother Petre, who had been invalided home with ruptured eardrums: ‘You ought to have seen some of the bombing raids we get mixed up in here at times, Petre. Talk about Ypres, it was a “wasp fight” to the raids now. I have had the “wind up” in the true sense since then. Such awful great things they carry. You would think it was an ammo dump.' He was sorry to learn of their father's death and ‘that things were not a little brighter', but at least it would free the family to sell up Stoke Rivers. Unable to bring himself to write the name of the house, he called it, as if it were a curse, ‘that place'. He wrote: ‘It is time all were away where they can get a little encouragement for what they are doing. A change away from everything is what our dear old mater wants.'

 

Back in Stoke Rivers with her wounded sons, the widowed Mrs Hordern was never separated from her Bible.

Ivy showed it to me, plus the three pieces of paper that her grandmother had tucked into it. Her grandmother was always taking them out and reading them for consolation.

– A sermon delivered two months after Hordern's death: ‘When people are “dead” they are able to see what is taking place in this world. They are really more alive than ever they were when they were with us. They watch us most tenderly.'

– A quote from Patience Strong: ‘Forgive! The years are slipping by and Life is all too brief.'

‘Did she ever talk about her husband's drinking?' I asked.

‘Granny Hordern wouldn't say anything nasty,' Ivy said. ‘She'd make excuses for anyone, not like me. I'd say something horrible if they need it.'

After the funeral, Hordern's widow stayed with Ivy's mother on Mannings Jetty Road not far from the riverbank where she had landed in the mud 17 years before; and then, in 1921, when Ivy's mother got married, she went to live in Devonport with her widowed daughter Ethel.

‘Poor old Granny, she used to keep us going in clothes,' said Ivy, who recalled a reserved, sedate woman, not saying much except ‘My dear' and permanently dressed in black. ‘If Maud puts on black, I don't like it.' When not in church, her grandmother sat knitting in the dining room in East Devonport, straight-backed, and the high neck of her dress fastened with a mourning brooch inlaid with seed pearls. ‘She had plenty to think about, plenty of regrets, poor Granny. You couldn't have fun with her. What happened in her life made her like it.' Ivy folded back the sermon between the gilt-edged pages and looked at me. ‘You see, when she was young, she would go out dancing.' As a child, Ivy had been allowed to touch it: a black silk dancer's shoe streaked with gold. After her Bible, her grandmother's most precious possession.

In old age, Mrs Hordern could be observed striding up Preston Road with her walking stick, one hand in the pocket of her wind-whipped long black coat, and lamenting the state of the orchard at Stoke Rivers which her husband had laid out with such patience and into which the new owner had disgracefully allowed his cattle. In 1921, Stoke Rivers was sold to the Owens and subdivided into five plots. The Owen bullocks had crashed through the cyclamen and cardoon, trampling the ‘John Ridd' vines to smithereens.

The lines on the third piece of paper read: ‘Oh! That my eyes might closed be/To what becomes me not to see!'

‘
IS THERE ANYONE ALIVE WHO MIGHT REMEMBER STOKE RIVERS?
'

Ivy had a telephone number in Melbourne for Brodie's son and I called him.

‘They reckon I look like my father,' he said.

‘What did he look like?'

‘Not a bad-looking bloke. Tall for the time, about five foot eleven. Brown hair, greeny-blue eyes, and a fair-sized bit of sniffing gear.'

He was describing SPB, I told him.

In 1938, when he was nine years old, Brodie's son visited Stoke Rivers with his father, who had taken over the property on his return from the trenches until it could be sold. They had met Granny Hordern, ‘a real English lady', and then they walked to the farm, Brodie hacking a path ahead through the bush and killing a four-foot tiger-snake that he hung over the fence. They emerged into a clearing where there was a small bush cottage made of sawn timber. ‘I don't think it had ever seen paint.' Brodie pointed out to his son a horse trough that he had carved from a log, and a large table in the kitchen where the family used to eat their meals. Brodie was not a backward-glancing man – ‘the past held nothing for him' – but the experience of returning to his adolescent home flushed out an unwelcome memory: the memory of Brodie's father, Petre Hordern, eating his meals in this cramped space, separate from the children. The kind, gregarious John Ridd had become a tetchy recluse.

Brodie's son said: ‘My old man wouldn't run his father down to me, but he announced – which I thought odd – that he counted on both hands the number of times that he sat down to a meal with him.' He went on: ‘My father didn't have much time for Petre Hordern. He was a pompous bloke that hadn't realised circs had changed. He didn't adapt to the new life. He still liked to play the image of a country squire and it didn't work. When you're in Rome you ought to adjust a fair bit to what Romans do.' And then he said: ‘I think Petre Hordern was unlamented, much so. I don't think any of the sons had much time for him.'

After his death, Hordern's sons scattered as pigeons from a blast. Brodie sold Stoke Rivers within three years and went to live in Melbourne, becoming a salesman of sewing machines; his deaf brother Petre worked as a dairyman on King Island and became known as ‘the old hermit'. The club-footed Nigel went to live in Queensland where he grew tomatoes and was eventually buried in the biggest cemetery in Australia; the quiet, gentle Joe worked in a munitions factory in Footscray, marrying the woman who ran his boarding house. He died in his eighties, of liver cancer. Ivy said: ‘You could hear him I don't know how far off, trying to breathe, and he didn't deserve it, poor Uncle Joe.'

But Hordern's daughters stayed on in Tasmania.

I spoke to a woman married to a Hordern descendant who had made a distressing visit to Stoke Rivers. One day in the 1950s her husband decided that he wanted to show off his family's first home in Tasmania. He drove her in a green and cream Holden along the Arnoll Road where the long arm of the Leven Blackberry Pest Committee had failed to reach. She said: ‘We came to the end. And there was this four-room sort of verandaed house covered in blackberries – just overgrown with them. It was a shocking sight.' Her husband had known the original Boode from when he was a Lancaster pilot stationed in England during the Second World War. ‘It upset him to think what they came to from that. It was a big step down. Definitely a big step.'

‘Did you see inside the house?' I asked.

She said: ‘He was so upset that we didn't get out of the car.'

 

I wanted to see Stoke Rivers for myself, but Ivy said that it had been razed to the ground, and she could not be sure whether she would remember the site, even though it was only a few miles away. She telephoned her brother-in-law, Teddy, who lived in the next field. As a boy, he had worked on Hordern's farm, planting potatoes for its new owners. Teddy was probably the one person alive who knew the exact spot where the Horderns had lived.

Teddy arrived moments later, a tall, cheerful man with red-veined cheeks who told me that his family had once owned a grand hotel in Cairo.

I followed his car in the Peugeot through North Motton, past the cemetery and along Arnoll Road. After a few miles we passed a blue board nailed to a tree that read ‘Not far now'. The fields rose steeply into the Dial Range and I recognised the shape of Old Sawn-Off from Ivy's photograph, but that was all I recognised.

Then Teddy drove through a gate and came to a halt in the middle of a grassed-over field on the summit of a hill. I parked beside him and he called through the window: ‘Here we are.'

I climbed out, looked around. The field sloped down to Library Creek where Teddy had once overturned his tractor when ploughing potatoes. It made me wonder if Hordern's books had anything to do with the name. All that remained of the forest of ring-barked white gums was a line of four macrocarpa and two pines. All that remained of Hordern's proud garden and orchard was an old laurel tree fenced in with galvanised tin.

We paused beside the laurel and Teddy pointed to a bump in the grass 50 yards away. ‘That's where the house used to be,' and I saw that it was right here, under this laurel, that the photographer had stood to take his picture of Hordern's wife and children.

I walked over to the bump – covered in dandelions and cowpats – and stood for a minute, looking down to Library Creek, and imagined SPB's cousins playing hide-and-seek in the shadow of the dying gums and stopping to remove thorns from their bare feet. I was reminded again of Somerset Maugham: ‘It seems to me that the places where men have loved or suffered keep about them always some faint aroma of something that has not wholly died.'

I plucked a small branch off the laurel tree and left.