Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  ‘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 th
is 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.

  ‘I had the idea that this place was something like you would see in the film Gone with the Wind: a massive house with lots of servants, green rolling fields and hills surrounding the house, and on the hills, fat animals grazing happily. I thought it would be hard to see much of the sky past the hills and the big old trees dotted everywhere. Of course, this same sky would seldom be blue as it rains so much.’ The foundations of these pictures were, of course, the green and grey of her own land.

  John returned to Australia to take up a new life on the family station. In these first years on Marmboo, John was not yet seeing what would become painfully apparent in time—that his father was not going to be able to willingly share the business decision-making. John was focused instead on developing the physical skill set that pastoralism requires, and on enjoying the experience of getting to know the property as an adult. Children, even teenagers, see loved land differently to adults. Returning to a property means that you have to grow new knowledge around old perceptions: in childhood a fence extends forever, but working on it is easier as the responsibility doesn’t rest with you. As an adult, the fence is simultaneously shorter and more work.

  He wrote to Mary, and she wrote back. They also corresponded by tape for the pleasure of hearing each other’s voices.

  ‘John would send these long tapes about the workings of the property, cattle and sheep, and then right at the end, talk about how he missed me. I didn’t care much about the cattle and sheep, I’d just fast-forward the tape and listen over and over to what he said at the end,’ says Mary.

  ‘One of our sons once complained about a few hours of driving to get to see the girl he was interested in,’ John says. ‘I said to him, “Son, I courted your mother from halfway round the world, do not give me that rubbish about 120 kilometres if you’re really keen!”’

  In Belfast Mary was in her final year of study and thoroughly enjoying the opportunity that being a trainee teacher of home economics provided to really get to know the students.

  ‘With teaching cooking or sewing you are moving around the classroom, you are chatting to these young people, and so you hear about their lives and what they have been up to,’ she says.

  Mary was fascinated by these teenagers whose lives were so different from her own safe and tidy growing-up years. On one occasion she was teaching a class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls. ‘Two of them will be late,’ she was told by the head of home economics. ‘You are not to ask them about where they have been, just accept that they will be late.’ But Mary, in her chatting with the two girls after they turned up, did find out why they were always late to her class. They had been servicing the British soldiers stationed up the road from the school.

  ‘They said, “We go up every day. We go from eight to ten.” I was horrified. I couldn’t believe that this was going on, part of their everyday life,’ says Mary, still unable to fathom that this prostitution by schoolgirls had been accepted, even by the school. She wonders now if the school was actually threatened or even if the school was getting a reward for their silence.

  ‘Every one of these children would have a story to tell. And some of them had such hatred. I couldn’t believe that such hatred existed in such young people. I was teaching thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds in the poorer areas of Belfast. I didn’t come across this hatred so much in the more affluent areas. I wonder if it is like this all over the world: that a lot of the fighting, a lot of the antipathy, happens in the poorer areas. People are out of work, they sit around, they tell stories, urge each other on and probably find themselves doing things they had never envisaged—being part of an army, servicing an army …’

  Mary was also exploring the cultural differences between North and South. The North, under British rule, was very ‘English’. The South, having gained its independence from England in 1916, was very Irish.

  ‘The English are very matter-of-fact, and everything has its place and goes back in its place. The Irish have a casualness—if the thing is not back in its place, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be fine, don’t worry about it. You do enjoy that. But I was feeling that living in Southern Ireland wasn’t what I wanted. I’d enjoyed being in Belfast and since leaving for boarding school at thirteen I had spent my time coming and going from my home town so I didn’t feel I really fitted in there either. I wanted to somehow keep the freedom I experienced in Belfast, even though I did have to be careful where I went.’

  Mary declined the opportunity to spend her next summer holidays on a kibbutz (a communal farm or settlement in Israel and the ‘in thing’ for vacations at that time), and instead decided she would visit Australia, and John. The summer holidays came, and Mary had made herself ready to go to Australia—the visitor’s visa was stamped on her passport
and she was immunised—while somehow knowing very little about where she was actually going.

  ‘It was amazing how I took off to a country I knew nothing about. I didn’t look to see where Longreach was on a map—and my mother and father didn’t say to me, “Do you know where you are going? Have you checked on a map?” All I knew about Australia was something an aunt of mine had told me—that there were a lot of sheep in that country.

  ‘The actual flight over took thirty-two hours. I met with friends of John’s in Sydney and had a day there, and then I flew up to Brisbane. In those days the people meeting you were allowed to come onto the tarmac. It was a long time since I’d seen John and I had no photograph of him, so I had no real idea what he looked like. I knew he had curly hair. I knew he had glasses.’

  Nothing teaches you about the fragility and inadequacy of human memory like a long separation. You reach into your mind for the other person, but over time their face, hands and smell fade away. In just a few short months their image won’t flash up on the screen of your mind. You are left with what feels like an empty description—you might sometimes dream of them, but that can distort memory rather than repair it. And after all, Mary and John had not had a great deal of time together: four evenings, two days and then a long weekend. Mary hoped that her image of a gently spoken man, in whose company she felt an unaccountable ease and joy, was a true one. She was also hoping that he was actually going to turn up.

  ‘I had a lovely little white suitcase, my hair was done and I felt drop-dead gorgeous! I walked down the stairs of the aircraft with a big smile on my face, but I was absolutely petrified—was he going to be there? I had no phone number for him. I had no idea where Longreach was. There was no such thing as ringing him up or sending him a text. I was just hoping that this guy who had said, “Yes, come to Australia,” was actually going to be there to meet me in Brisbane as he had promised.