A Fig at the Gate - Kate Llewellyn

Kate Llewellyn is a poet and diarist who is best-known for her poetry & her memoirs of creating gardens in various parts of Australia. The Waterlily is probably her most famous book, about living in the Blue Mountains. I realised when A Fig at the Gate was published that I still had her previous book, Playing with Water, on the tbr shelves. I've pulled it off now though & look forward to reading it soon.

Llewellyn is now in her seventies & has moved back to Adelaide, South Australia, where she grew up. Her siblings are near by as well as friends she's known from her nursing days. She knows this climate well, & prepares to create a new garden in her house by the sea. The book is a diary, written from 2009-2012, moving through the seasons. Adelaide has experienced even hotter, dryer weather than Melbourne over the last few years so I could relate to her struggles with the climate & the failure of plants to thrive in the hot summers. I love this description of the beginning of autumn,

The first cold day and welcome, too, a feeling of zest and a sting in the air with rain in the night. The tank is half full. I knock, knock with my knuckles on the corrugated iron rings of the tank to hear where the water level makes a dull sound. ... A flock of starlings flies up from the newly mown lawn. A willie wagtail hops around in its cheerful way and a Murray magpie flutters down and then up. when pruning the apricot tree a while ago, I found a small bird's nest high up in the tree. I left the branch in case the bird uses the nest again. A sparrow flew into a dense olive tree in the front garden and, thinking it may be nesting there, I have been out to search but, apart from a small crop of green olives, the tree is empty. A flash of green and a lorikeet flew out. Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Apart from the planning & enthusiastic planting of the garden, Llewellyn visits friends & family, tries to make friends with neighbours, starts a garden on the roadside opposite her house, lies on her bed watching the trees through her window. She is very frugal & always on the lookout for some free seedlings or a way to reuse an object that would otherwise be thrown out. She rescues some old pink bricks from a demolished house (carrying them in a green wheelie bin) to create borders around the garden beds &, walking past a house with a load of soil on offer for free, soon has a friend there to help carry away as much as possible in buckets & wheelbarrows.

The garden causes just as much pain & frustration as pleasure. Seeds are sown & fail to come up. A crop of tomatoes at the side of the house, where nothing has probably ever been planted, give so much fruit that it can't all be eaten. Nothing ever grows there so well again so was it just that it was virgin soil? I loved the story of the blood orange tree. Nurtured, fed, mulched, watered, the tree gave no fruit at all. Listening to a gardening show on the radio, Llewellyn hears that blood oranges should be left alone & if neglected, will thrive. Which hers does as soon as she pulls away the mulch & ignores it.

The other major saga is that of the chickens & later, ducks. Llewellyn grew up with chooks & her brother rears them for a living so she is keen to have her own small flock. She begins with six white pullets & all is well until she introduces six red chickens. She calls the result the War of the Roses. She learns from her mistakes about feeding them & caring for them when ill. She even sets up an intensive care unit in her shower for the hens when they're sick, bathing them & anointing their bare red skin with calamine lotion. The story of the chickens becomes as suspenseful as a soap opera. I find I'm racing on to the next entry to see what has happened to the latest patient. Rearing ducks is more successful as the pair she buys soon have nine ducklings, most of which have to be sold as pets as there's not enough room for them.

There are many beautiful quiet moments in this book where Kate Llewellyn meditates on the pleasures & pains of getting older. The aches & pains of her body & a bout of depression are the downside but the advantages, from being able to lie in bed late watching the trees to being eligible for Council help with maintenance around the house, are also celebrated. I enjoyed reading about Kate Llewellyn's garden, her chooks, her clever contrivances, her successes & failures, everything that goes to make up this one woman's life.

Ammonites and Leaping Fish : a life in time - Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is one of my favourite writers. The first audio book I ever listened to was her According to Mark, read beautifully by Michael Williams. According to Mark has remained my favourite of her books as it combines her twin preoccupations of time & memory. Mark is a literary biographer working on the life of an early twentieth century writer. This was the era of the great biographies - Holroyd's lives of Lytton Strachey & G B Shaw, Ellmann's life of Oscar Wilde - & Mark's subject, Gilbert Strong, is one of those grand old men of Edwardian letters. It's the story of his research & the surprises he discovers. It's also the story of Mark himself, of his marriage & of his attraction to Strong's granddaughter, Carrie. It's a wonderful novel, funny but full of interesting things to say about the nature of biography & reputation.

This new book, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, is not fiction but a memoir about old age & memory. Lively looks back on her life from old age. She remembers her wartime childhood in Egypt (written about in more detail in Oleander, Jacaranda), the disorientation of returning to England after the war, her years at university, meeting her husband, Jack, her writing & the traveling that she once relished (including a farcical visit to the Soviet Union in the 1980s). She misses gardening now that arthritis prevents her from doing much more than tend a few pots & she observes that conversations with friends of a similar age (Lively is now 80) now consist of stories about visits to the doctor & heartfelt inquiries about each other's health or lack of it.

However, my favourite parts of the book are the chapters on reading & books & the final chapter about six objects that bring back memories of different periods of her life.

I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts: the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and sheer pleasure. Back in the mists of very early reading there is Beatrix Potter, who does not just tell an enthralling story but challenges the ear. Her cadences, her linguistic flights that i repeated to myself over and over. 'the dignity and repose of the tea party', 'too much lettuce is soporific', 'roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce', 'The dinner was of eight courses, not much of anything, but truly elegant.'

Many of the books mentioned inspired her love of history & archaeology, major themes of the novels & stories.

For me, interest in the past segued into an interest in the operation of memory, which turned into subject matter for fiction. I wanted to write novels that would explore the ways in which memory works and what it can do for people, to see if it is the crutch on which we lean or the albatross around the neck. It is both, of course, depending on the person concerned.

In the final chapter of the book, Lively talks about six items that recall her life. The kind of objects that mean very little to anyone except their owner. A pair of kettle-holders from Maine with ducks on them; a Bible given to Lively by her nanny when they were evacuated to Palestine during the war; a sherd of 12th century pottery with two leaping fish on it; a fossil with two tiny ammonites in it, millions of years old; a copy of a statue of an Egyptian cat, the original of which is in the British Museum; and a sampler stitched by Elizabeth Barker in 1788. All these objects lead to memories of bird watching, her childhood, visits to America, digging in her own gardens & finding sherds of pottery from previous households. the beauty of the King James Bible over any other version & her never-ending interest in time.

I wish the whole book had consisted of memories like these. In an earlier memoir, A House Unlocked, about her Somerset grandmother's house, Lively used a similar technique, taking objects & telling the history of the house & of her family. I found this final chapter & the chapter on reading much more engaging that the view from old age, I'm afraid. Still, Lively is always an interesting writer & I would recommend Ammonites and Leaping Fish to anyone who has enjoyed her fiction. It's sent me back to dip into her novels & maybe I'll read According to Mark again & enjoy Lively's meditations on time & the past once more.