When home is... a Compound in Saudi Arabia

Whenever Stephanie Hatton thinks of ‘home’ she thinks of a community, or suburb or city but never a house. ‘Maybe that’s because I’ve always lived in pokey apartments’, she says. After growing up in Sydney near beaches and parks, she moved to the UK for six years after finishing her university degree. She and her husband returned to Sydney, started a family and a year ago moved to Saudi Arabia.

Like most expats moving to the Middle East, the Hattons have come for career advancement and to save money. They plan to stay for up to three years. But for a westerner living in Saudi, even for a very short amount of time, it’s a hard adjustment. In Saudi, Stephanie is also unable to drive and has to wear an abaya in public. Shops shut four or five times a day for prayer and the heat is oppressive (over 45 degrees Celsius a day in Summer). While she misses much about Sydney – ‘the parks, breakfasts at buzzing cafes, beaches, the sparkling harbour and the freedom to walk about and do as I please’ – Stephanie and her family are happy with their new home.

In Saudi, most expats live in compounds. As Stephanie says, ‘this is primarily for security reasons but also for the freedom (women can walk about in “normal” clothes) and the sense of community.’ All the compounds are bordered with high walls and barbed wire, while Saudi National Guard soldiers armed with machine guns are stationed at the entrance. Stephanie and her family usually have to go through two or three checkpoints to get into the compound. The Guards will check her ID (iqama) and search for bombs and other explosive devices. As Stephanie says, ‘I was horrified by this the first time I arrived; even though it does make you feel safe. Now it's just part of our daily routine. Lily [her daughter] waves hello and goodbye to the guards every day.’



But it’s also the compound lifestyle that gives this family their sense of home. ‘Most people go out of their way to make you feel welcome. The lifestyle here is so vastly different for most people and particularly tough for women to settle. From the first day I arrived, I was invited for coffee at someone's house, my daughter was invited for a play date and I had people showering me with advice and tips.’



From this sense of community come strong friendships, ‘Whenever someone hears that you or your kids are sick, you always get a call with an offer of help. When my husband and eldest daughter were stranded in the UK because of the volcano ash a few months ago, I had a stream of visitors bringing baby food, offering play dates and keeping me company so I wasn't too lonely.’

Stephanie also feels that compound life is ideally suited to children, ‘The kids' lifestyle is so safe and free. They ride around on bikes and all the people in the restaurants, shopkeepers and pool boys know their names. When they go to the playgrounds, they know all the children there and when we were recently flooded all the kids came out in their swimming costumes to splash about on the roads - it was such a nice sight to see.’



The family’s villa is much larger than anywhere they have lived before: three bedrooms, two-and-a half bathrooms and a pool on their doorstep. Stephanie also has a maid who comes in a few hours a day five days a week and it’s this extra help, especially with young children, that makes it easier for Stephanie to be so far away from her family, ‘I’m trying to make the most of the time I get to spend with my kids and enjoy the slow pace of life.’



But living in pleasant surrounds cannot change the climate, ‘There are air conditioners in every room to cope with the heat and in summer you need to run a bath for the kids using only cold water and wait half an hour for it to cool down before putting them in!’

Stephanie also likens compound life to ‘living in a retirement village as it’s a VERY slow pace of life and it can drive some people around the bend. It's also hard to have any anonymity. A friend of mine describes it as “boarding school for women” and I imagine it would be tough if you had a falling out with someone although luckily that's not happened to me...yet.’

While the house Stephanie’s family lives in doesn’t really feel like theirs, ‘I really don't think you ever feel like a compound villa is your home. Every villa looks pretty much the same (only slightly larger or smaller) and people are so transient here’, that doesn’t really matter, ‘I guess for me, it's hard to separate a home from a community or neighbourhood. I've never been much for having the best or biggest house on the street. I think it's much more important to live in a nice community. As long as you have your family with you, it doesn't matter where in the world you are (even in the middle of the Arabian desert!).

*Photos of Compound & desert by Stephanie Hatton

Home from the beach without shells

We’ve just returned home after a long weekend away at the beach. After unpacking sandy clothes from bags straight into the washing machine, the next thing to do is decide what to cook for dinner. Something that doesn’t involve any fresh ingredients so I can put off visiting the supermarket until tomorrow. While staring into the pantry, I suddenly think about a recipe I read in my sister’s 1950s copy of Australian House and Garden magazine.

It’s for a ‘Devilled Seafood Special’. I’m not even sure what devilled seafood is but apparently it can ‘enliven a tired meal or leftovers’. What reminds me of this recipe today is the magazine’s suggestion of presenting the food in seashells: ‘The shells themselves can be found on beaches. Probably you may have some stored away...relics of other holidays when you’ve beach-combed.’



Well, we beach-combed and didn’t find any shells at all. Perhaps some tiny ones, but certainly none large enough to serve up a meal. And this was on a large and very deserted beach. My four-year-old was also insistent that no one touch the shells once we did see some as ‘you need to leave them for the hermit crabs or they won’t have a home’. He became quite distraught at the thought of little crabs searching all night long without a home to call their own.



This anxiety was thanks to a ‘travelling aquarium’ that came to his preschool a few months ago. The children were allowed to look at starfish, feel seaweed and see other marine life living in rock pools. They were also told to never collect shells on the beach, or if they had to, to only take one or two as otherwise there would soon be none left.

At the time I thought this sounded ridiculous. Yet another fun, outdoorsy, technology-free pastime of childhood was no longer ‘allowed’. I loved having a shell collection when I was younger; looking at them and remembering which beach I collected them from. What was the harm?

But, after this weekend, I wonder if maybe it was true. Are we running out of shells? Where have these dinner-plate size clam shells gone anyway?

So, here I am without shells — those ‘pretty assets to have on the kitchen shelves for serving all kinds of seafoods’ – but for tonight at least I have found a tin of tomatoes and a packet of penne.

How Property Writing & Home mix

When you spend your days writing about other people’s homes, how does that change your own thoughts about ‘home’? Lucy Macken is a property writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and here she tells us how her feelings about ‘home’ have changed:

‘My idea of home has varied over the years, from where ever the majority of my clothes were at any given time in my early 20s (I moved from share house to share house regularly and often in a taxi), to something far more cumbersome in my late 20s and 30s.

Prior to property writing though, the only pre-requisite was it had to be in walking distance from either Newtown or Darlinghurst with a great TV. Views became a must-have briefly, but that was ditched in favour of a backyard in my early 30s. Now that I had kids and I couldn't afford Sydney real estate that managed both.

Home is far more of an investment for us now, which is often a headache when I look up from my desk. After looking at all the images of minimalist, whiter-than-white living areas with sparkling and stark stone bench space, I often forget that that is a fanciful way to live when you're housing three kids, husband, dog and the odd school bag.

That said, I am constantly assessing our needs from a home within the context of the wider real estate market. So we recently decided, for example, not to renovate not because we don't love our house, our street, the parks around us and the schools, but because we would be over-capitalising. So sad, but true.

What defines our home has become increasingly related to our immediate neighbourhood rather than our own house, but that is more due to the kids than writing about real estate.

I finally get what they mean when they say location is everything. It's not just the name of the suburb, but how close are we to transport? How close are the parks or water? Is it a quiet street or a risk to life every time we run outside? What are the neighbours like?

Living in the inner west, the proximity of the neighbours makes it more important than ever before to get on with them. You don't communicate by lawyer but more over the back fence, asking for the ball to be kicked back or to apologise when it lands in someone's dinner.’

When Home is... Food Memories

I have been thinking a lot about food recently and the comfort a home-cooked meal brings. Maybe it’s because we’re in the middle of Winter when comfort meals (like the Shepherds’ Pie I’m in the middle of preparing for dinner tonight) always conjure strong memories of feeling safe, warm and secure.

Maybe it’s also because I’m writing up my interview with Natalie and Simon Thomas, owners of The Sydney Picnic Company, which will be all about how food makes a ‘home’.

Whatever the reasons, I thought now would be a good time to start thinking about the relationship between food and home. Last year I wrote an article that was published on the parenting website Sunny Days. It’s all about my food memories, recipes written on bits of paper, backs of envelopes and shoved inside a recipe journal...

Scraps of the Past
(first published on Sunny Days, 1st July 2009)

'It’s the making-food-book!' says my son excitedly as I search through the multifarious scraps of paper that live inside this book to find our banana bread recipe one recent Sunday afternoon.

I bought this blank-paged journal soon after I left home when I realised I didn't know how to cook spaghetti bolognaise, tuna mornay or whatever other childhood comfort dishes a 21-year-old thinks she needs to know. I had planned to write all the recipes in it, just as my mother had done and continued to do throughout my life. But after neatly writing a few, the book remains blank and unopened. The spine threatens to break though; it has begun to tear thanks to all the loose paper recipes I 'one day' meant to transcribe but instead are just shoved inside.

My husband walks into the kitchen as I begin to sift. 'I don't know how you can find anything in there.' He adds as he passes, 'We don't even use half those recipes.'

And, as I stare at the mountain of paper in front of me I realise he's right. There are recipes I cut out of magazines five years ago and have never attempted. But now is not the time for a cull. My son has already pulled a chair over to the kitchen bench and is on his way to collect eggs from the fridge. Not the safest job for a three-year-old. It hadn't taken long to find the banana bread recipe anyway. I know the scrap of paper it's on -- my father's old company's letterhead -- and it’s heavily stained with coffee cup rings and traces of, perhaps, egg? As I grab the beaters I wonder why I never bothered transcribing this. Five ingredients and three steps is hardly many words, yet it's been sitting on that piece of paper, inside that book for years.

Once the banana bread is in the oven I decide to declutter. One more recipe could be the metaphorical straw. So it begins: the Coconut and Raspberry Bread torn from a magazine, dated a few months after my daughter's birth nearly six years ago. The same recipe I used for the morning tea after her Naming Ceremony. Instantly I'm back in our first marital home, the sun streaming through the window as I baked. I don't want to throw that memory away.

Moving on, there's a lemon syrup cake recipe which I remember taking on a weekend trip to the country when I was eight months pregnant. We weren't near any shops and had to bring all the food. Next to the list of ingredients are little ticks made by my husband's hand. Obviously it was his job to pack the food. We ate that cake drinking cups of tea while watching the cows and ducks as we contemplated life with a baby. Another memory, another scrap of paper kept.

An old printed email appears from a time before children; a risoni recipe a friend had sent me -- at 10am -- that apparently I wanted to cook that night. Obviously it was a slow work day. It's strange to see the sign-off with my position and company details: another life. Both of us are now home with children and it's not long before I find a handwritten note from that same friend for a kids’ version of chicken casserole. No longer does she end her recipes with 'serve with a full-bodied red'; now it's 'add some chilli and it becomes an adult dinner'.

Some shiny paper unfolds and I realise it's fax paper -- a faxed recipe! -- with writing so faded some letters no longer exist. I notice the measurements are in pounds and ounces. It's the apple crumble recipe from my oldest school friend. Her British mother used to make it for us frequently when we were kids and when this friend's grandmother died she was given the Wedgewood dish her grandmother used to bake this crumble. I've always known it by heart and think of her family whenever I make it. I can't bear to throw out the memory of using our parents' fax machines to communicate when we were 14. Also, how many recipes end with 'Put in a bowl and eat with spoon’?

There’s the 'San Choy Bau' recipe I secretly tore from an office magazine, now crinkled at the edges. I fondly remember this ‘phase’: my husband and I were living together and this recipe became the 'dinner party' one. What could be better than friends, a bowl piled high with iceberg lettuce leaves and a few bottles of chardy? Oh, the mess. The lettuce breaking, the sauce running down chins... the carpet... but who cares when you're 23? Actually, if we cooked this now for our three children it would be a similar experience. Best kept; those were good times.

A green note sticks out. It's the mussels in white wine recipe from an aunt. She and my uncle invited us over for dinner to celebrate our engagement. Afterwards, she wrote the recipe while washing up. It's still water-stained from a stray soap sud. A few years later they divorced and my aunt cut off contact with his family, including me. I was very fond of this aunt and now, with the benefit of age, I can understand her inability to stay involved with his extended family. I don't want to erase the last evidence of her in my life though. Another scrap to keep.

A recipe that has made it inside the book is 'Tim's flourless chocolate cake', written by Tim himself. I remember the night we ate this. He was going out with one of my closest friends and it was perhaps only the second time we met. Each couple brought a course and theirs was obviously dessert. They were late. 'It's my fault,' he began, 'I got stuck at work and got home to discover I was out of flour.' I looked at the flan tin he was holding with the very flat cake. 'But it's ok, it doesn’t need it.' And very quickly, after a few bottles of red, it became Tim's signature dish. He wrote the recipe down late that night and I wondered if years later I would even know this Tim of 'Tim's flourless chocolate cake' fame. As the oven timer goes off and I pull the banana bread out, I question how I didn’t realise he would go on to marry my friend and later become godfather of our youngest son.

Now, looking at the pile mounting in front of me I decide to stuff all these pieces of our past back inside the heaving covers. These scraps are the keepers' of our family's story; I realise this book is one of the most important objects in our house. My husband's trash is my treasure it would seem.

Later, my mother tells me about an old lady who didn't survive the recent catastrophic bushfires in Victoria. She was found in her car and next to her was a complete china dinnerset. The image haunts me. Imagine the tales those plates, soup bowls, cups and saucers would have to tell. What precious memories did they trigger which made the thought of losing that china unbearable for her?

I don't want to throw away my memory triggers. One day when the children are older I will share these stories about how those recipes have shaped our family and later it will be up to them to decide if those scraps of paper are ready to be binned.

When Home is... a yellow bedroom

In 1892, a 6000 word story titled The Yellow Wallpaper was published in the New England Magazine, causing much hysteria. Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written a story so powerful that from publication it challenged the 19th century attitudes towards women’s physical and mental health, and it remains today an important early work of feminist literature.

Written in first person, the narrator and her husband are staying in a rented house for the summer. She has recently given birth and is recuperating from what her husband, a doctor, has diagnosed as a ‘temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency’, which we know today would be treated as post natal depression. He keeps her locked in an upstairs bedroom, instructing her to rest and not work, or see her baby or even think: ‘the worst thing I can do’. So, she keeps a journal in spite of him.

Here she sits and writes, in this room decorated with yellow wallpaper, ‘the colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.’ With nothing else to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the wallpaper and we, as readers, watch her decline towards psychosis.

Or is it psychosis? The beauty of this little book is that we are peeping into her journal and therefore we are in the hands of the most unreliable narrator. She thinks she is quite sane: ‘This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! ... I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store’.

But then she starts to see the swirling patterns of the wallpaper moving and realises there are women creeping around behind, ‘The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.’ And I won’t ruin the ending for you, except to say this. There are a couple of schools of thought on whether this book is a great example of Gothic literature for its illustration of powerlessness and madness, or whether it is, as many feminists read it, an example of a woman triumphing over her husband in the end. He faints, but I won’t tell you why.

I first read The Yellow Wallpaper during my early 20s when I was neither married nor a mother. It is even more heartbreaking and powerful reading it now. It is one of those books that has haunted me all these years (The Women’s Room by Marilyn French being the other) and I am yet to read anything as powerful and clever in so few words. If you get the chance to read this book, do. Afterwards I doubt you’ll ever want to sleep in a room with yellow wallpaper.

Homesickness cure... a Roast Chook

Jane and Tim Nice along with their three children have lived in New York for four years... and counting (well, I am counting since they are among our closest friends, we are godparents to each other’s children, their first son and our first son were born a month apart... anyway, this is meant to be about their homesickness not about me missing them so I’ll stop carrying on).

Over the years, Jane and I have had countless conversations about differences between Australia and America, and many more about how much she misses home, family and friends. So, I wonder... is there a meal she craves when she’s feeling particularly homesick; one that takes her straight back home?



‘It’s funny, but I always associate comfort food from home as something my mum used to make when I was growing up rather than food Tim and I used to eat as a young married couple in Sydney before we moved here’, says Jane. ‘Of course, we have barbecues over here all the time and it does remind us of Australia, but generally we only have 100 days of warm weather and although we have tried barbecuing in the cold, the barbecue sometimes doesn't even come to temperature (we are only allowed electric grills - no gas) because it is below freezing.’

The dish that Jane and Tim cook as real comfort food, while not necessarily ‘Australian’, is one Jane’s mum used to cook on a Sunday night when she was growing up: roast chicken. ‘I get mum to make it every time she visits because no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to replicate her homemade gravy. I don't know what it is about having your mum cook for you but in some respects I guess it makes me feel like a kid again and forget the responsibilities I have as a mum of three now. I think it is also the familiarity of the meal; you know what you are going to have and how it is going to taste that brings about a sense of real comfort.’



‘Whenever we have a roast (and it isn't every week like it was when I was growing up) our dinner conversation generally revolves around Australia - growing up in Australia and funny anecdotes about our childhoods. Although we may have changed how we do a roast since my childhood days, it still conjures up feelings of home and the comfort that home brings.’

Tim is the chef in the Nice household and he always prepares the roast and the gravy (it’s a big responsibility knowing it’s Jane’s favourite but she seems pretty happy). Here is his recipe:

Sunday Roast Chicken & Veg

For the Chicken:
1 roasting chicken enough to feed your crowd
5 slices of proscuitto
100g of butter
fresh rosemary
fresh thyme
2 bulbs of garlic
1 lemon
salt
pepper
olive oil

Wash and dry the chook thoroughly, inside and out. Then salt and pepper. Chop the herbs finely, zest the lemon and crush the garlic. Mix this stuff with the butter. Quarter the lemon and place inside the chook cavity. Gently put your fingers between the skin on the breast on both sides of the breast bone, creating a pocket: stuff some of the butter under the skin on both sides. Put the remainder on the outside skin including the drumsticks. Put the proscuitto slices over the top of the breast. Then using a little bit of olive oil, cover the rest of the skin. Tie the ends of the drumsticks together. Put it into the oven, in a pan on a rack, at 400F/200C for as long as it takes to get the juices from the thigh meat to run clear. Throw veges like carrots and onions in this pan after about a quarter of the cooking time.

For the starchy stuff (spuds and pumpkin): I bring them to the boil then immediately drain and put back in the pot to dry them out a bit. Dress with olive oil, salt and pepper. Take another roast pan and heat some olive oil on the stove top and then throw in the spuds and pumpkin for a minute before putting them in the oven. They need to cook as long as the chook - or not.

For the gravy: once you take the chook out of the pan, drain off some of the fat and juice from the roast pan, but not all. Use a big spoon of flour and throw that in the pan and stir it into to make a paste. Then add some water or chicken broth - start making a looser paste and then apply gentle heat (on the stovetop). Add more liquid until you get the consistency you want. You might need to strain it before putting it in the gravy boat. The more sticky stuff you have in the pan, like onions, the more flavour you will get. Use salt and pepper to season.

And there you go. Make sure the chook is cooked, the spuds are dark and sticky and the veges are to your liking.

Tim’s final word of advice: Pray your gravy is as good as your mother-in-law’s.

Neighbour tales

Not long ago on our daily walk from the front door to the letterbox, my two-year-old and I bumped into our next door neighbour collecting her mail at the same time. Our neighbour is her late 70s. She and her husband are from Portugal and have lived in their house for 47 years. Their two children grew up here and in the five years we have lived next door their backyard has always been filled with the noise of grandchildren, extended family and friends.

They have created a second kitchen in the garage, the driveway capturing much of the sun, and they live most of their lives outside. The smells coming from her garage have always been appetising and we know when big dinners are planned as the smell of onions and garlic frying starts in the early afternoon.

We’ve not had much to do with this couple, lots of waves and smiles in the street and every Easter and Christmas our neighbour will bring over a freshly made plate of churros. Lately I had noticed their garage and driveway had been very quiet. It had been a while since I’d listened to laughter and garbled Portuguese voices from over the fence.

‘Hello darlink’, she said to me from her letterbox on this particular day. She tickled my son under his chin with her manicured hands, nails painted bright red. ‘Beautiful baby’, she cooed.

‘How are you?’ I asked, ‘Lovely day.’ Our conversations rarely strayed beyond the weather or the children as her English was quite broken and my Portuguese was, well, non-existent.

‘Not good, not good. My husband, he no good.’ She looked up at me shaking her head. ‘It’s very bad, very bad, this alzheimer’s thing.’ She put her hands inside the front pocket of her apron and sighed.

I had no idea he was unwell, although I remembered recently turning into our driveway to see him wandering down towards our front door only then to see his wife lead him away, berating him in Portuguese. I thought he looked bewildered but I hadn’t realised the extent of his condition.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I began, ‘that must be really hard for you.’

She smiled and took my son’s hand, ‘no, it’s hard for him. He doesn’t recognise his own son anymore. He sees our baby and says “who is this man?” “I don’t know this man” and I say “What do you mean? It’s your own son!”’ She picks the mail out of her mailbox, ‘He still remember me because I love him so much. Every day I keep holding his hand and telling him how much I love him.’

She grabbed my hand as she told me this and looked at me fiercely, ‘I tell him everyday how much I love him so he won’t forget being loved. But today no good, no good at all, he is very confused.’ She looked up to her house and shook her head again.

‘Is he still living at home?’

She nodded and looked at me, her eyes wet. ‘Fifty-seven years we been married. Fifty-seven years!’ she rolled her eyes skyward as though she herself could not believe how much time had passed. ‘Fifty-seven years and that man has never given me a day of trouble.’ She was crying now. ‘Not one day of trouble’. She wiped her eyes while still holding her rolled up Coles supermarket catalogue and assortment of envelopes.

‘I’m so sorry’, I said again feebly, trying to absorb the magnitude of losing a lifelong partner so slowly and painfully. I wanted to ask her over for a cup of tea or give her a hug but she was already wandering back up her driveway.

‘I must get back to him’, she said to me over her shoulder, ‘bye darlink.’