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 Dear Virginia,
Home means different things to different people. For some it’s purple walls and green carpet. But not for me. With that initial burst of foolish adrenalin that came when I looked around the empty rooms of the house I’d just bought, I decided to paint those purple bedrooms white. After three days of going up and down the ladder thousands of times to get from the paint tray to the high ceilings and walls, my legs started to complain. I called on the services of the local osteopath and also a painter.
Anthony, the painter, came complete with Oscar the bichon frise, a miniaturised version of the Dulux dog. Oscar ran off to play happily with the neighbour’s small daughter, who then asked her father the “Why can’t we have a dog?” question, over and over. The neighbour told me about this when he came around to return the cute doggie to Anthony, who was now paint-splattered and surrounded by empty takeaway coffee cups. I took a photo of him and the coffee cups and Oscar.
Anthony fuelled himself with six takeaway coffees a day while he was transforming my house. I showed his photo to the Frenchman who owns the coffee shop just across the road and he put it in his newsletter and pleaded with me to keep employing Anthony.
So I’m building a community around me, as you do in a new place. At the same time I’m trying to turn my empty shell of a house into a new home. I have a fail-safe way of creating a homely atmosphere when there are no floorboards, no curtains, no fridge and no hot water. At the end of a day sanding, painting or measuring, I unplug the borrowed crock pot, which I filled at first light, and I put it in a sturdy cardboard box. I transfer it into the car and drive ever so carefully along Dominion Road, down Symonds Street and down the steep corkscrew off-ramp to son Robert’s apartment. The new parents and I soothe baby Tane off to sleep, then we tuck into Irish stew, lamb shanks or soup. Hot food with gravy – old-fashioned and always delicious – is a comfort for tired new parents and also my comfort while I am so uprooted and as yet homeless.
What do you do to make you feel at home in a strange place?
Janice
 Dear Janice,
What do I do to make a strange house feel like home? I thought about it but couldn’t decide what the definitive action was, except that it had nothing to do with coating rooms in white paint.
I went to bed to sleep on your question and just before dawn woke to a low-slung moon shining through the curtains. I had the answer: I make a vegetable garden.
I fell in love with vegetable growing at the age of nine and have remained faithful ever since. A house without a vegetable garden is not easy to love, so I try to create one as soon as possible. In my flatting years I dug small vegetable gardens in derelict lawns. At Double Tops I dug up whole lawns and converted them to vegetable gardens. Here at our temporary house I don’t need to deface any lawns. There are three little boxed gardens surrounded by bark chip paths. Oh dear, I shall feel compelled to conform to the symmetry of the oblong boxes and plant all my vegetables along geometrical lines.
I will no longer be using sheep manure to boost production; I’m converting to fowl manure. The farm we have bought has an array of sheds, many of which were turned into hen houses by a previous owner, who must have harboured a fetish for fowls. When the fowl fetishist departed, he left the sheds coated with a concretion of fowl manure. Harry has been laboriously shovelling the manure from the floors and heaping it into a mountain. I will shovel the mountain into dog tucker bags and store them in the little garden shed next to my neat boxed gardens.
Bags of fowl manure remind me of an old friend who sold hundreds of bagfuls to raise funds for a student ski club. He drove about the suburbs, knocking on doors and showing his wares. By the time he reached us, he had polished his sales pitch and in very refined tones asked us if he could possibly press us to buy some “Superb Turd of the Bird”. I have, ever since, regarded fowl manure as a superior fertiliser.
Virginia
Story: Janice Marriott & Virginia Pawsey
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