Lantern Light!

Well, here I am again! I’ve packed, unpacked, settled in, and done all the ‘things you do’ in a new place. (Refer to my first blog post, Getting Started, i.e. Why I began a blog.  – Apart from the minor detail that I love writing anything from novels to shopping lists!)

My latest novel arrived today! – and hopefully will be in the shops very soon. I notice it is on order in the big ones! It’s called Lantern Light, as I mentioned in another life (well, another suburb anyway but it feels like another life.) Hopefully I’ll manage to get its photo on facebook. It’s the book with the nice green jungle photo on the cover.

It’s a fictitious story set in a real place – the school where I taught in New Ireland (PNG). A truly beautiful place. An amazingly English style school, with an English headmistress (who gave me permission to use the school as a setting). It’s also set in Brisbane during the 1974 floods and I even went to the Public Library to research it thoroughly (despite having watched it from the safety of my lounge room on our old TV soon after my own return from New Ireland). So the setting, place and ‘history’ are real. The story and characters are not. It’s romance, adventure and inspirational – with lots of suspense. You can see the Word website if you want to know more about the actual story.

Lantern Light will be available in Koorong, Word and other Christian book stores. Hopefully Dymocks too.  I’ll sell it myself as well.

The title Lantern Light is inspired by the wonderful evenings we had, we teachers in the school there, talking by the light of a hurricane lantern after the school generator went off at 9pm.  We made really close friends in that cosy setting. (As I have said, I am still close friends with two of my PNG friends.)

I’m doing my first-ever book signing at the Cleveland Christian Book Centre on Friday 19^th December.

 

So – I’d better leave it at that for now.

 

I hope to be back on line before Christmas. I hope it’s a happy and blessed one for you all, just in case I’m not back in time.

PACKING

 

This house, which I’ve been renting for twenty years, has been sold! Soon my wooden cottage and its lawns and gardens will be replaced by about six townhouses. Maybe more. It is the end of an era for me – and for this suburb.

So for the last few weeks I have been packing, preparing to move. My back and legs are aching. My age is showing (or feeling!)

The house is in a state of organised chaos. In my better moments I know where most things are. Like papers in boxes, particular books, packing tape, scissors, my house keys! . . . I am surrounded by boxes - packed and empty.

My visitors have to pick their way down a lane between the towering piles, a bit like a cardboard version of an English hedge-maze. The move is not until the end of July/beginning of August but I am still teaching and have various other commitments during this time, so I have to start sorting and packing now.

Sorting the papers I’ve accumulated over the twenty years I’ve been here was a daunting job but fascinating at times. I came across things I’d forgotten all about. Like poems published in the paper when I was a child. Then I read an untitled piece of prose and thought, That’s interesting! And realised it was an alternative beginning to the novel I am still/again working on.  Lantern Light.

(Yes, I probably said I’d finished it but that publisher didn’t like it and well – here’s a better beginning so . . .  I’m working on it again!) It may yet qualify for the Guinness Book of Records for the most rewritten novel in Australia!

(For the record – and to horrify my fellow writers – I only wrote Jodie’s Story once. Not one edit or rewrite. I was younger and perhaps gullible but it was published and sold very well!)

 While I was in the middle of sorting my papers ready to begin packing, the Speech and Drama eisteddfod was on. My pupil Emma had prepared a few pieces but opted for doing only her drama as the poem was late at night before a school week.

She performed her drama, an excerpt from Dags, beautifully, and came back to her place, wedged between her mother and me. The next minute, another girl stood up and did a different piece from the same play! When we finally reached the end of the section (it was actually good entertainment, with several extremely talented competitors), the adjudicator shuffled through her papers, wrote on a few certificates, and walked out the front. “Highly Commended, competitor No 12 with Dags,” she announced. Emma sat there glued to her seat. It was surely the other girl. I stared at the programme. No 12 was Emma! By now everyone was staring at us. In a daze of surprise, Emma walked out the front and received her certificate. As it turned out, she had beaten several of the well-known Local Talents. I was so proud of her!

I returned home, changed out of my ‘glad rags’ and resumed my attack on my worldly goods.

Kenilworth - another glimpse

On the long hot 35-plus degree days last summer, you could hardly blame me for reminiscing about canoeing down the Mary River at Kenilworth in the shade of the overhanging camphor laurels and river oaks, sometimes dipping my hands into the water to cool off again or pulling over to the bank to slip into the water.

One such day stands out in my memory. I’d paddled vigorously (well, more or less) upstream to the bridge, under it and a little beyond. Then I slipped the paddle into the canoe and let the outgoing current carry me quietly, gently back to the Homestead. For a moment I fancied I was back in PNG or somewhere like Africa, as I drifted silently downstream amid the loops of overhanging vines and trees lying out across the edge of the water.

Reflections of trees lay green and perfect on the surface of the stream, fairly narrow and still in that part.

I listened. Silence. Nothing and nobody to disturb my idyll. Why would I ever want to return to the city? Then I heard a slight rustle of twigs and I saw a tiny red-breasted wren hopping around in the long grasses at the water’s edge.

Gliding faster now across the swimming hole between the towering mud cliffs, I watched the kingfishers swoop and dart in and out of holes in the mud walls. Great walls, carved and sculpted by the surging and scouring of violent flood waters. That river periodically changed from a silver thread to a vast brown relentless torrent.

I reached the beach near the Homestead and pulled the canoe up onto the pebbly sand.

There was no sign of anyone in the kitchen. Nobody was home. Apparently.

After a quick lunch I went to the office, breathing in the fragrance of furniture polish and old books. Selecting a book to read, I was soon back in ‘my’ room at the Homestead.

Sleepy after canoeing in the sunlight, I lay on the big old brass-knobbed bed and gazed through the lace curtains to the mountains beyond. I began to doze. Cloud-reflections, like the surface of the water, slid across the screen of my mind. Sounds blurred.

Suddenly Justyn’s voice interrupted my half-dreams. Justyn’s voice surprisingly close to the wall beside my bed. “And this is Lord Lamington’s room,” he was saying in his most cultivated tones. “We call it that because he once slept . . .”

Two of the broad cedar panels beside the bed concertinaed open to reveal a group of immaculately dressed, astonished tourists led by Justyn. And there amid the antique beauty of the room lay, well, not Lord Lamington, but me – with messy hair and a crumpled dress.

I don’t know who was the most surprised. There was actually a doorway of the Secret Panel variety right beside my bed!

“Oh!” he laughed. So did I. Most of the visitors looked amused now, some slightly awkward. Justyn, of course, had not realised I’d come back from my expedition and was just doing one of his duties, showing visitors around the Homestead.

I later discovered there were quite a few of these secret panels, connecting various rooms to one another in unexpected places. Broad red cedar boards, about two of them, would fold back and become doors.

Those two, Elvira and Justyn, must have had fun growing up there! I often wonder how Jim and Jennifer kept track of them!

Our Unforgettable New Zealand Holiday - first snippet

If you want to see Mt Egmont, you’d better pray!” announced Peter. “It’s over there behind all those clouds.”

We prayed.

The clouds rolled back – dare I say, like the Red Sea – to reveal Mt Egmont towering crystal clear and snow-covered, against a cloudless, bright blue sky.

We gasped in delight and grabbed our cameras. Peter pulled the car over and we all photographed the mountain.

That was typical of the little miracles that highlighted our holiday. And it had, after all, been a holiday birthed in prayer. It felt as if it had been God’s idea all along, to bless us after a year at Bible College for the others and of teaching for me.

There were five of us most of the time (a few times we had one extra on board). Peter, our experienced leader, gentle Margy, sweet Jenny, musical Rod, and me. We had planned to carry all our possessions in back packs and crammed all our things in accordingly. The first indication that this might not work was when we wriggled into the packs at Auckland airport, only to find our backs aching, our knees buckling.

That was how we came to buy our bright orange 1949 Vauxhall which we named – with perhaps prophetic insight – Amazing Gracie. Believe me, it was often God’s grace alone that held that car together. It was the source of many dramas - and miracles.

That car, with five of us crammed inside and our packs tied on top, was like our home on wheels for five weeks. We were jammed in together all the time we travelled around the two islands and we got on well nearly all the time. Some of God’s remarkable blessing may have been because we were so unified.

Except once.

A slight disagreement had arisen about how long we women took to get to bed, with our facecreams, lotions and whatnot. Peter, who was a strong and capable leader, told us to get to bed earlier.

Over breakfast, I protested. “You’re being too bossy!” I told him.

He retorted angrily. I replied even more angrily.

We each stalked off to pack our things into our back packs and headed off to the car. I sat beside Peter in the front seat (back seat travel made me feel sick). He stared straight ahead. A slab of tangible silence wedged itself between us. I glanced at him nervously, then looked over my shoulder. Three sets of twinkling eyes told me Margy, Jenny and Rod were trying not to laugh.

Usually all laughing and chatting, or Rod singing, this time we drove all the way to the next town in silence. We chugged into the town at dusk (which is late, say 9 or 10 pm, in February in New Zealand) and looked at the motor camp we’d planned to stay in. It was full. There was no room in the inn for disunified, grumpy Christians! We tried several places. Sorry, no room. Our hearts sank. And I suppose we all knew God was teaching us a lesson.

Finally at about 11 pm we arrived, tired, frustrated and still angry, at the People’s Palace – not our usual choice of venue. We had a good night’s sleep and a big breakfast, and learnt an important lesson – God required us to be in unity if we wanted His blessing. I presume Peter and I apologised but my mind has conveniently deleted that neat ending! Sufficient to say, we went on our way all caring for one another and laughing again.

There were many miraculous interventions. (There were many urgent needs!) We had to push Gracie on and off the car ferry between the two islands. And again down the main street of a small town when the car decided to ‘just stop’.

Gracie rattled to an I-need-help halt just as we entered a town with a garage after winding through the countryside. And again at the bottom of a narrow mountain road which we had blithely navigated. Each time, help was available. And we were safe. If the clutch had gone on the mountain . . .

Perhaps the funniest time was when we broke down on our way home from a church in Lower Hutt. We girls sat in the dark back seat of the car while our two able-bodied men hopped out to rescue us. We waited and waited. We were tired, cold and hungry. Surely . . . Peter’s head appeared at our window.

“Would you pray that I’ll know how to open the bonnet?” he asked plaintively.

A few minutes later, Peter knocked at the door of the house near where we had broken down. The lady invited us in. It turned out her son was a mechanic and he went to the church we had just attended. He cheerfully fixed Gracie while his mother spread out food for us. We went on our way . . . again!

When we arrived at Queenstown, the Remarkable Mountains were bare in the warm summer air. We rented a glass-fronted unit for a week and watched the mountains change colour in the shifting sunlight and the long, gentle twilights.

After a few days, Peter said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if God put snow on the mountains tonight!”

We agreed, it would be lovely.

The next morning we awoke to a leaden sky and snow falling on the tops of the mountains which were already white-capped!

It was indeed a blessed holiday.

Speech and Drama

They come in all shapes and sizes, all ages from about four to about sixty-four. From lispers to film stars in the making. That’s my speech and drama pupils.

I love teaching such a variety of people. I enjoy the literature too – which ranges from Shakespeare to poems like ‘Pussy Talk’. Most of the pupils love it too.

I switched from English teaching in high schools to speech and drama teaching at home in 1985. Actually there were several years in between when I cleaned houses to pay the rent and wondered what I could do for a well paid living apart from being all but a police woman in high schools. (By the way, for those of you who are successful high school teachers and thrive on it, congratulations! It’s an incredibly important job and one not everyone can enjoy. But it was not for me.)

There’s a lot to be said for having a mid life crisis.

Finally I remembered my love of speech and drama at school, my wonderful times at Jack Thompson’s workshop (yes, The Jack Thompson) in the old Twelfth Night Theatre (thanks, Jack, they were lots of fun and very helpful too), and my year of workshops at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney. So I studied for seven or eight months with a private speech and drama teacher and managed to get my letters (ATCL) to teach speech and drama. And loved it.

Often I find myself thinking, “I’m actually being paid to do this!” as I enjoy a well-acted piece of drama or a cute child’s poem. Okay, I do the preparation too and do actually teach the pupils!

Many of my former pupils have done well. There are several who are speech and drama teachers themselves now. And there’s Anna in London – she won a bursary with the Rose Bruford College – and seems to be making a very successful career of acting. (I remember her as a skinny little girl with a barely-there voice with a beautiful if quiet tone and lots of expression.)

One of my recent ‘stars’ was Ariel Smith who learnt dancing as well as speech and drama. He managed to land a paid role in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang here in Brisbane. Ariel is eleven and is very good at drama, dance and even singing. A package deal! He wooed the adjudicator in a recent eisteddfod with his rendition of a poem about a kid not wanting to be in the eisteddfod. (It was alarmingly convincing!).

There’ve been many times when whole families have come to me for lessons. A parent would drop the ‘kids’ off after school, I would intersperse them according to their ages through the afternoon. At the end of the day a parent would pick them up.

I’m sure my place sometimes looks like a child minding centre. I enjoy the sound of the kids laughing as they play and wait their turn.

“What are you playing?” I ask them.

Hopefully it is a sign of success? - “We’re doing improvisations and acting exercises!” they reply.

Remembering Kenilworth - Glimpse no.1

During the summer holidays I find myself looking beyond the clutter of suburbia to images of Kenilworth. I re-live sitting on the verandah and gazing at the gently rolling hills, slipping into the cool silky water of the Mary River, laughing with friends, and walking along the Obi Obi Valley road in the last light of the day.

Back in the 1980s, exhausted after two very demanding years, I was recommended to have a break at Kenilworth Homestead, then owned by the Rowes. It was their family home, a historic homestead on a large, beautiful property on the Mary River.

It was a foretaste of heaven. I loved the people, the place and being free to walk and swim – alone or with others – in an incredibly peaceful setting. The sheer beauty of the place seeped its healing into me. Its gently rolling hills, the pulsating greenness of the grass, Jim’s garden where I often sat – a riot of spring flowers with an enormous wisteria, fragrant jasmine looping through the trees, larkspurs of every colour, and innumerable others.

The Rowes and I enjoyed one another’s company. (They were, in fact, some of the most hospitable people I’ve ever met.) Jennifer with her effervescent personality bursting into joyful song as she cooked and washed; Jim, the Gentleman Farmer, equally at home driving a tractor or reading; lovely Elvira, cuddling baby Rebecca while she chatted happily or arriving laughing with her husband David; and Justyn, who kept us laughing with his antics and clattered coffee cups in the kitchen at two in the morning as he studied for his Year Twelve exams. It was here, too, I met Jennifer’s God-daughter Laetitia (of Loquacious Laetitia blog) and spent many evenings walking and talking with her.

So began a series of holidays at Kenilworth. This hot weather nudges to my mind memories of the evenings Jennifer would set up tables grouped together out in the garden, and invite me and other guests to join them for the evening meal. As the sun sank beneath the horizon, slanting shafts of light through the trees, a peace would settle on the land. The hot air would turn balmy and caress our sunburnt shoulders. And we would – as usual – talk and laugh while Justyn (and often Paul) provided constant entertainment. (Justyn has lots of acting ability, a good imagination and a terrific sense of humour, so he made an excellent comedian!)

Kenilworth anecdotes are without end so I’m sure you’ll get more glimpses at some stage. I just wanted to mention one that stood out to me as a newcomer to Kenilworth.

Jim was one of the gentlest, kindest men I’d ever known. He really was. He knocked at my bedroom door at 6.30 each morning.  “Do you want a cup of tea, Jeanette?” he’d ask. And in response to my half-conscious mumble, he’d shortly produce a cup of steaming tea and two slices of buttered toast laden with marmalade. He was one of those people who are rarely ruffled, take everything in their stride. A real Aussie farmer, he’d weathered droughts, floods, the works.

He had a dry sense of humour and I didn’t always know when he was joking. Okay, I’m a bit gullible. Well, so I’m told.

To walk into the township of Kenilworth, which I enjoyed doing, one had to cross the old bridge across the Mary River. I looked at it in dismay. No footpaths. No railings. And not a very wide bridge.

What would happen if an enormous truck came or two cars passed each other while I was walking across it?

“Jim,” I asked, “what would you do if that happened?”

“Jump!” he replied, without missing a beat.

“Seriously?”

“Jump!” His face was impassive.

I thought of that long, perhaps twenty-something foot drop. The water was usually shallow with sand banks. An old branch draped with debris poked up out of the water. I imagined myself hurtling through the air and splattering onto a muddy sandbank – and  shuddered.

But I suppose he was serious. I mean, the alternative . . .

So what I really did was: peered carefully both ways, straining my ears for the drone of an engine, flung a quick but fervent prayer heavenwards, then ran across. I never did have to jump. Perhaps country born and bred people just stroll across, trusting the cars to give way to them. And I suppose they would.

That old bridge was broken and washed away in one of the many floods. I hope the new one has footpaths!

Jim has passed on to those greener pastures of heaven now. We all still miss him. But I suspect he’s sitting under a heavenly gum tree, smiling as he thinks of us, and saying in his philosophical way, “There’s a season for everything. It all works out.” As he had said when the land ached with drought or flood waters lapped towards the Homestead.

I carry a little piece of Kenilworth in my heart still.

Brains and Miracles

According to my understanding of the current teaching about one’s brain, as I learn to do new things – like this blog on the computer – I’m actually creating whole new thought patterns in the part of my brain less used until recently.

I’ve always thought of myself as the creative, articulate type but who knows, there may be a whole new personality waiting to be accessed.

Do I want that?

Not really. I mean, for better or for worse, I’m me. But I think it’s good to develop our brains. Especially as we get older! I reckon I need all the thought patterns I can create up and running.

I used to know a man whose brain was radically damaged in a car accident. In fact, at the request of Openbook Publishers, I wrote a book where he was one of the main characters, so I got to know him quite well.

Craig was a highly talented musician – a composer, conductor and piano and double-bass player. His music had been selected to be played during a function with the Duke of Edinburgh visiting and the Duke had complimented Craig on the music. Craig had travelled to various countries as a musician.

When he was twenty-five and at the height of his musical career, he was in a car accident. It was 1977. Rear seat belts were not compulsory for back seat passengers then, as far as I know. Craig was a passenger in the back seat and his head took the full impact of the car roof hitting the road as they rolled over and over again. After many days in a coma in hospital with concussion and a cerebral oedema, he awoke completely unable to think or communicate normally.

When he was finally released from hospital, the doctors said he would be watching television sixteen hours a day for life – if he were lucky.

It was a long, hard haul but with the help of many specialists including the brilliant Dr Wood, an eminent neuropsychologist, he actually ‘learnt to think again’, using a different part of his brain. He never regained his ability to compose music but after some time he was back playing instruments, recording in an elaborate studio he had built himself, running a business – and doing various other things such as conducting a band in a local school.

When I interviewed him, I saw no evidence of a brain-damaged man. Only a highly gifted one. And when I interviewed his neuropsychologist in Adelaide, I asked him if he considered Craig ‘normal’ now.

He looked at me in horror.

I looked back apprehensively.

“Craig’s not normal,” he said. “He’s way above normal. Gifted.”

He is, that’s for sure, a walking miracle. A miracle produced by his own perseverance, the talented doctors, and God. There were, needless to say, many people praying for him throughout his trauma.

Our brains are amazing creations!

Lantern Light

Currently I’m awaiting a publisher’s verdict on my latest book – another novel inspired by real life places and people. Real situations.

It’s set in beautiful New Ireland (part of Papua New Guinea) where I taught in 1973. And where I met several of my friends including Glen (now in Cambodia) and Peter, both of whom some of you know.

Peter and I both taught at Madina Girls High School, an astonishingly English-looking place. To get there, we drove down the narrow winding Boluminski Highway, an unsealed road that snaked its way scarily around blind bends in the jungle and coconut palm plantations.

We turned off and wound down narrow car tracks and suddenly entered another world.

A school with neatly but artistically laid out gardens, flowering hedges and cottages - all with the backdrop of the vast green sprawl of the jungle. Immaculately dressed girls worked in the gardens after school, and the happy sound of their singing and giggling filled the air. Madina nestled at the foot of the mountains and only a short walk from the brilliant aqua sea. The heat was stifling in most of the area but Madina enjoyed a lovely breeze from the sea.

The headmistress, Miss Marchment – who has given me permission to set my novel in Madina (which I’ve called Barrington Place) – was an awe-inspiring lady who intimidated many who encountered her. A strong woman with a pioneering spirit, she ruled her school with a rod of iron, the heart of a mother and the soul of an artist. I was very shy with her at first but once I knew her, found her a delightful person who befriended most of her staff.

Clad in what she called ‘my red dress’, Miss Marchment would ‘go to war’ against any red tape or regulations threatening the well-being of her pupils. (Another teacher: Shhh! Miss Marchment’s coming. She’s wearing the red dress!) She tended to get whatever she felt she needed for her charges! Many of these girls have gone on to be high-level professionals in various countries and are still in touch with her.

I’ve called my novel Lantern Light because of the wonderful evenings we spent huddling around hurricane lanterns, talking until all hours, long after the generator had gone off at nine o’clock. There was a peculiar atmosphere of intimacy and security in that capsule of golden light with the dark, whispering jungle brooding around us.

It was an atmosphere that inspired the telling of many secrets. We told one another all sorts of things we would have been slow to tell our friends back in ‘civilisation’. Sometimes the outcome of our confidences was surprising!

The descriptions of Madina and its surroundings are not exact, but I’ve tried to do what Louis de Bernieres (author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) says he does – to capture the flavour rather than the exact details, to give it ‘literary truth’. (He says that in his Afterword to Notwithstanding, a book inspired by the English village where he grew up.)

Incidentally, my characters and the main story are completely fictitious, although I’ve included a few events inspired by things that really happened to people I knew on New Ireland and have acknowledged this in the Foreword.

Here’s a hint about the plot:

Teaching in the jungle of New Ireland, Ali longs for a greater challenge. Dave loves risks and danger.

 What will this cost them?

And the theme:

Surrounded by brooding but alluring equatorial jungle, Ali and her friends are safe in a capsule of beauty and order.

What will happen if they break the capsule?

So . . . we’ll see what the publisher says.