Love In a Sunburnt Country (14 page)

Most vegetables were grown on the property in line with the seasons, which meant there were only a few weeks in which you could have, for example, cauliflower or green beans. Preserves were made year round to capture those seasonal abundances. Milk and meat would both have come from the property. Bread, biscuits and cakes were all made at home. In the early days Joan made nearly all her own clothes as well as her children's.

‘Mum was very good to us kids. She went without so we could have things,' says John.

Joan's children gave her great joy. The goals of parents then were not the same as parents now—with their own experience of life being so hard, many postwar parents simply aimed to make their children tough enough to survive. But the love with which Joan and Jack raised their four children was evident. John's warm, stable childhood became the foundation for his life. However, there were many distractions in Jack and Joan's married life and John feels now that worked against their being able to achieve real closeness in their marriage.

‘Right from day one, there were staff around and that would have played a part in their relationship,' says John. ‘There was always someone there.'

It was, he says, a very orderly upbringing for that reason. It wasn't until John was away at boarding school that he remembers the six of them—Jack, Joan and their four children—having a meal as a family.

‘I always worried that my father hardly knew my mother, and that then their lives would have taken them further apart. And Dad was a very dominating character,' says John. ‘There was never any doubt that he was the boss. It was good in some ways—he trusted his own judgment, he could be kind and generous—but not in all ways.' John knew he didn't want to have a marriage exactly like the one he perceived his parents shared.

Granny Curran, who had unceasingly attempted to control all around her, did not change as Mary grew up. Her sights were now set on controlling her grandchildren's adult lives. She believed she had found the ideal husband for Mary and promoted the match whenever and however she could. She could not understand that Mary's goal in marriage was intimacy. The marriage Granny proposed was one of financial security and improved family networks—Tom was thirty years older than 21-year-old Mary, and a respected local farmer.

‘My grandmother thought that I should marry him, because she herself had married a much older man—and she'd been a widow for a long time because of it. She would say: “Oh, Mary, how's Tom going? Lovely boy, now lovely man, lovely man.”'

Under considerable pressure from her grandmother to become friends with Tom, Mary accepted his invitations to spend time with him, and she grew to value him as a mentor and friend.

‘Tom taught me a different side to farming as he specialised in beef cattle, which resulted in him going around to shows and judging cattle. He taught me how to play golf, he took me out to dinner and in general was a very interesting man with years of experience behind him. He was known far and wide throughout Ireland, which meant that whenever we went out we would be asked, “Now what will you have to drink, Tom, and what would your daughter like?” He was nice company, but as for marrying him—no! But it was amazing how Granny kept pushing it.'

Rebellion had always been difficult for Mary. It was not that she had trouble knowing or saying how she felt—it was getting people to believe she meant what she said. Her manner and voice are gentle and courteous. To be heard and believed she inevitably found herself resorting to dramatic tactics, as in the event that saw her thrown out of finishing school.

Mary had left school wanting to study home economics in Dublin, but her marks in both compulsory languages were not sufficient for her to gain entry. There was another way in. She could attend a finishing school (very different to the famous and non-academic ‘private Swiss Finishing Schools' with their focus on etiquette and deportment), where she could continue to study languages and hopefully from there gain entry to the home-economics course in Dublin.

‘But the finishing school nearly finished me off,' she says. ‘To begin with they made me head girl, which didn't please me one bit because I knew I would have to behave accordingly—I'd been head girl at my boarding school—and I didn't want that, I wanted to have a good time.

‘Towards the middle of the year, the head nun, Sister Mary Mercy, had the idea that I should do a first-aid course. I said, politely and reasonably, that this wasn't my cup of tea. Sister Mary Mercy became more authoritative and insisted that I do the course, to which I replied that I wasn't going to.' The nun was clearly convinced that polite, obliging Mary would fall into line with a bit more pressure. ‘Then she told me I had no choice. So I said, “Well, you can stick it up your arse, I'm not going to.” She was horrified. She told me to pack my bags and go, to which I replied, “I would be only too delighted.”' She felt rather less delighted when she found herself with bags in hand and out on the street a short time later.

The only benefit of her time at the finishing school was that it was there that Mary heard about another home-economics school, this one in Belfast. Even with Vera's steadfast upholding of the value of education, Mary is still surprised that her mother supported her in choosing to attend a college in Belfast in Northern Ireland. It was 1973 and at the height of the civil war known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles'.

Despite a name suggesting nothing more alarming than digestive difficulties, the dangers of living in Belfast during the Troubles were very real. It was a war zone: soldiers, guns, searches, traumatised children, limited public gatherings, bombings, attacks, bricked-up uninhabitable houses, unexplained ambushes and killings, political negotiations failing, outstripped daily by the ugly and more final diplomacy of war. Vera had grown up in the North, in a town called Newry, and she had lived within that religious tension all her life. She understood the North and had acclimatised to it as just another random element—living was a dangerous business after all! For Mary, however, who had grown up in the warmer, safer Southern Ireland, Belfast came as a shock.

‘My friend Sister Lorena (who was a nun in the Mercy Order) and I had both applied to attend the Home Economics College so we took the train to Dublin and from there to Belfast. As the train was about to enter Belfast city we passed a big sign—“You Are About to Meet Your End”. It was quite frightening.

‘We made our way to the college for our interviews and on completion the head lady of the college offered to take us back to the train station and in doing so showed us the sights of Belfast. There was security everywhere, army men with guns stood on corner blocks and on the entrance to main streets there were big iron gates covered in wire which were guarded by soldiers. But I still wanted to go to Belfast, and Lorena and I didn't hesitate to accept our offers to attend the college. Nor did my parents stop me. My mother could have, but she didn't.'

Mary is touched and surprised and grateful to this day that her parents let her make her own decision on this. She had seen mothers who had prevented their children from doing what they really wanted with their lives. Her parents respected her wishes, even the ones they didn't totally agree with. They never stood in her way. Mary was to spend four years in Belfast, three of them as a student and one as a teacher, and never regretted a minute of her choice.

‘It was a whole new world for me. The meeting of people, the talking about religion, the acceptance of you for who you were.'

She went to cafes, pubs and parties. One evening she went to see a fortune teller who told her, ‘You'll marry a man with curly hair who comes from somewhere over the water, and you will have three children.' She thought it was a lovely prediction, but not for a moment did she believe it.

After Mary's parents had sold the big house Mary grew up in, it had become a bed-and-breakfast place as well as having some permanent boarders. The landlady's name was Jean Deevy. On Mary's college vacations Jean often employed Mary to assist her with serving the breakfast and evening meals.

In 1975, while Mary was home on vacation, John te Kloot came to stay in the bed and breakfast.

‘How did I come to be there? My godfather was a permanent boarder in that house,' he says. ‘And how did I come to have a godfather in Ireland? In the war my father was operating in the Mediterranean, and this fellow, Charles Gray, was the Wing Intelligence Officer (several squadrons make up a “wing”). They had quite a bit to do with each other. At the end of the war, when they were all going back to their own countries, my father said to Charles, “And what can I do for you?” and he said, “You can keep me a godson.” That's how it happened.'

The friendship between Jack te Kloot and Charles remained strong. The te Kloots had visited him in the 1950s, and Charles had come to visit at Marmboo in 1964.

In 1975, after studying and working elsewhere, John had decided that he wanted to return to live and work on Marmboo alongside his parents. Long holidays and being a pastoralist do not mix, so before starting his new life, John was determined he'd do all the travelling that would be impossible afterwards. Europe, with all its family connections, beckoned. Staying with his godfather was naturally part of his to-do list.

‘When I was staying with him he was tracing back the line of Grays to the bastard son of William the Conqueror. He'd done some interesting things. He'd been at the Lausanne Conference at the end of World War I, he was tied up with MI5, and between the wars he'd done an elephant trip surveying Burma—he used to drop names ferociously.'

John would listen to his godfather's reminiscences, help care for his elderly Pekingese dog, have cups of tea, and drive his godfather to his neglected property for another cup of tea. Not unnaturally, after a few days of this he was longing for some company of his own age.

‘There were two girls who worked in the kitchen of the guest house—Mary's old home—so I asked them out for a drink. One bolted, and the other explained she was engaged.'

Jean Deevy overheard this conversation and her heart went out to John. She rang Mary to say that there was a nice Australian boy who needed a bit of young company, and to ask whether Mary had any young friends who might like to meet him. Mary decided she would come and meet him herself. If nothing else, going out with a man would make it plain to her domineering Granny Curran that Mary was not meekly going to marry the man her grandmother had selected for her.

John was disconsolately facing the prospect of another evening of reminiscing in the company of the Pekingese when Mary arrived.

‘Mary walks in,' says John. ‘I didn't know who Mary was or where she had come from, and she says, “Well, are you coming out for a drink?” I knew nothing about it but I thought—“Righto!”' As he tells me this he glances at Mary, his eyes full of warmth.

Mary did not fully reciprocate this profound physical attraction straightaway. Like so many of the young men backpacking at that time, John was wearing chain-metal necklaces. Mary found all those chains deeply off-putting, but John was a warm, friendly, kind, well-mannered and softly spoken young man—a lovely boy, as the Irish would say.

John, as he says himself, was ‘marriageable'. He was looking for the right girl. He didn't want to find himself on Marmboo alone. And he was looking for someone with whom he could develop a rich intimacy.

‘I'd had girlfriends, but none of them fitted the bill.' And right from that first night he found he and Mary could talk easily. ‘And so we went out. Then we went out the next night, the next night, the next. I left after about four days to go backpacking again. Then I came back to visit Mary in Belfast while she was at college, and that was unusual for a tourist because it wasn't safe. Generally, tourists didn't come to Belfast as a bomb could go off in any public area. I was struck by the way places like the ferry terminal cleared the moment people were off the ferry,' he says.

‘When you went out to the pubs you had to be searched going in, everybody was on edge, because you didn't know if a bomb was going to go off either in the area or in the pub itself where you were having a drink,' says Mary.

‘Being an outsider I was just so interested,' says John. ‘I went to a gathering of Mary's contemporaries—where she studied there were both Protestants and Catholics, all studying, all getting on. Everyone I met was affected somehow by the Troubles. To begin with some pretended they weren't, but they all had been—hate mail, a cousin killed, killings, bombings. It had been going on for so long and people were really oppressed by it, just putting on a brave face to try to ignore it. They wanted to get on with life and then you'd think, why don't you leave?'

‘You asked them why they stay and their reply was: “This is our home. This is where we were brought up. We know nothing else,”' says Mary.

John left Belfast for more touring, but he continued to stay in touch with Mary.

‘My brother and sister-in-law had come to Lancaster as they were both studying there for a year and I made my way to them for a visit. During this time Mary came across to Liverpool by ferry. We had a really wonderful weekend. We went to Hadrian's Wall, to the Lake District. It was very romantic, it really all started there.'

‘Around this time John said to me: “You really need to come and see where I live.” I was just in awe of him by then. He was talking about this massive farm where everything was so big. Everything was in thousands, and I had grown up on a dairy farm, just fifty acres. We could count our cattle and see our boundary fence from the house. He was speaking a foreign language: jackeroos, kangaroos, were they the same thing? I didn't know. You can only relate to what you know, so I had no idea.'

In the absence of knowing, Mary imagined Marmboo instead. She imagined the many stock horses as being equivalent to Irish race horses, worth thousands. She imagined the family plane (a Cessna 172) as something like a Learjet. The mention of staff—governesses, cook and overseer—had her picturing a castle surrounded by acres of high green grass, heavily stocked.