He has followed the march of young saplings as they climb the sides of hills in great armies, regiments of lusty life, each eager to slip into the place of the giant whose day is done, crowding and pushing in the eternal strife of all living things, where only the fittest stand out above the ruck. Here and there he sees the wavy line broken by a forest monarch that lifts its stem clean-soaring, for 100 ft. or more before sending out a simple limb. How intimately, too, he knows the river gums that guard lonely places, where mists steal from the valleys and blot out the hills – Amazon nymphs, with limbs like marble, that catch his breath with a beauty for which he has no words. He has seen tall, dead trees stand out on the hills like ghost forests, and has watched them turn to silver in the moonlight. He has sometimes been almost awed by gnarled and twisted suggestions of hoary age, such as those which fired the imagination of Dore. No wonder he resents the word monotonous.
Chapter 14
WINTER VISITORS TO BLAIRGOWRIE COTTAGE
‘On the clear, cold mornings of autumn I used to steal often into my garden and revel in its rich gifts of colour and fragrance and song. Even now, when winter’s icy finger has set its seal on many of my flowers, and I find hardly a bird with the heart to sing, I still find other quiet pleasures awaiting me, and the promise of a riotous spring.’
May 1951
A figure sits quietly, backlit from the window. A tartan blanket is tucked over her knees. She doesn’t move. Perhaps she is asleep. Perhaps someone should check on her.
But then she shifts, uncomfortably, pain flickering across her face as she struggles to lift an ungainly bulk to a better position. She turns towards the window, round glasses glinting with light. Her expression is tired and drawn, but her eyes are quick and bright, inspecting the birds as they wash in the bird bath carefully placed just outside the window.
From time to time, her gaze wanders further across the pretty garden, past the neatly tended vegetable beds towards the wildness of the tea-tree scrub that shelters the cottage from winter winds blowing across the bay. Sandy paths between the bushes entice with the promise of exploration and adventure, but the woman in the chair turns back to watching the birds, leaning her cheek on a cushion that has been placed beneath her head.
Edith reaches for a notepad on the table, and begins to write, in a wavering but determined hand.
RICA ERICKSON DESCRIBED Edith as suffering from ‘a slight deafness’. I had found no other reference to this impediment although both her grandsons mentioned it in passing. It’s a minor detail, but I ask Peter about it anyway.
‘Oh, yes,’ he agrees. ‘She was profoundly deaf in one ear after a failed operation for Ménière’s disease.’
A friend of mine has Ménière’s disease. You would never know from her sunny disposition and unfailing optimism. I met her when we were both teaching creative writing at one of the local universities. Her energy was astonishing. She rode her bike to work each day, all the way across the city from the port in the north-west to the university in the south-east. Her enthusiasm for her work never waned, despite exploitative casual contracts which required her to do twice the work of less talented tenured staff for a fraction of the pay. You’d certainly never know she suffered from a major ailment.
I only found out about the impact Ménière’s disease has on Heather’s life from her writing – her novels, poetry and essays.
Ménière’s disease comes in a wide range of severity. The mild forms might consist of little more than persistent tinnitus and the occasional bout of dizziness. The disease typically appears later in life, in the forties, fifties and sixties. Sometimes it disappears; sometimes it is utterly disabling. Heather believes that the earlier it starts, the more severe and ongoing its symptoms.
Heather was diagnosed at 25. The noise in her ear permanently impairs her hearing – not quite ringing but more of a ‘whooshing fullness’, like holding a seashell to your ear. She is never without a sense of movement in her face, or her legs. She calls this sensation ‘the wind’. For a long time, she would walk close to walls, within reach of something to steady herself. Motion sickness is a constant risk – any kind of motion: cars, bikes, sometimes even walking. I discover she rode her bike to work because it made her less ill than cars or buses. On the worst days, even just the motion of chewing can make her throw up. Wind blowing in her face is a constant trigger. Severe attacks can debilitate her for weeks, confining her to her room, her bed, until the world stops spinning and she can keep down some food enough to recover her strength. And yet, to most people, my friend seems the picture of robust good health.
I reconsider Edith’s health. There is no hint in her published writing about ill health, certainly not anything as extreme as severe Ménière’s disease. She does not, in general, write about being ill. But she hardly ever writes about herself at all.
I know Edith suffered from repeated bouts of debilitating illness in her teens and early twenties; we have the Education Department’s punctilious
