Home

Home. Is it a house, suburb, city or country? Or is it a state of mind? Such thoughts have occurred to me many times during and since we returned from travelling as a family of five for five weeks.

For someone for whom the physical home is so important, I expected to miss my bed, my kitchen, my bath quite a bit. I hardly thought about them the whole time we were away.

Of course, there was the superficial fun of trying on different homes for size: the Wind and the Willows fantasy of living on the Thames riverbank; the canal house apartment in Amsterdam; the 17th century Cotswold cottage; and the Mansion flat in Knightsbridge, just around the corner from Harrods. All of them so very different, yet all of them feeling as much like home as the other.

Why? Because maybe I’m starting to realise that home now, for me, is the little family that Stuart and I have created. This tiny, insignificant group of five people in an overwhelmingly large universe is all I need. It wouldn’t matter where we were – even in row 60, 15 hours into a 24 hour flight – I still truly feel home with them.

This was such a different experience from the times of travelling alone when those interminable long-haul flights felt like limbo-land; life on hold waiting to reach someone else on the other side to take me home.

Homesickness also felt different. I missed people rather than places. You only need time away to realise how often you want to speak to close friends; to discover how closely they are stitched into the fabric of your daily life.

And family. There were times when I felt acutely homesick for the past. Watching my children’s eyes widen as they walked the streets of London for the first time reminded me of my sister and I many years ago. To go back there, to a time when my father was alive; when home was simply him, my mother, sister and I walking these same streets.

While staying with my uncle I found myself able to close my eyes and hear my father’s voice through my uncle as he talked about their childhoods and told stories about my grandparents. His mannerisms brought my father back to life for brief moments and for brief moments that feeling of homesickness was almost unbearable.

It wasn’t until we attended a wedding at the end of our trip that I fully understood how much my feelings about what represents home have changed.

It was a simple reading about love yet it resonated so deeply that I pocketed the order of service and carried it all the way home. Or was home actually travelling along with me all that time?

'Love is a temporary madness;
it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.
And when it subsides you have to make a decision.
You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together
that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement,
it is not the promulgation of eternal passion.
That is just being in love, which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away,
and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground,
and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches,
they find that they are one tree and not two.'

An extract from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

When Home is...Stuck in a Moment of Time

These past few weeks, while we have been living back in my childhood suburb, I have found myself spending a lot of time stuck in the past. We lived in three different houses here – the first house when I was seven and the third house I left when I was 19.

My entire family left at the same time, actually, and when my father died five years ago my parents had spent 11 years away from this suburb. So why has his death been haunting me during my stay here? We’re living in my grandfather’s house surrounded by my grandmother’s crockery, glasses, furniture and photographs yet it’s my father’s presence I feel most strongly.

Driving here late and alone the other night, I couldn’t help but take a detour towards the last house we lived in. To get there I had to pass another house once owned by close family friends, one of whom died the year after my father. They hadn’t lived in the suburb for years either, except their house looked just the same. A new family now live in their house and mine, yet it wouldn’t have surprised me to knock on the door that night and have these friends open it with welcoming arms. It also wouldn’t have surprised me to have seen my father sitting on the balcony of our old house, a glass of red in hand.

I was and am constantly surprised at how grief works; how it sits bubbling away just under the surface no matter how much time has passed. I am also surprised at how often I am now drawn to books that explore this most powerful of emotions.

Coincidentally, while staying here, I bought Kim Edwards’ latest book The Lake of Dreams. I enjoyed her first book, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, immensely and bought the second without knowing anything about it.

I say coincidentally because it just happens to be a book about an adult daughter returning to her childhood home, haunted by the death of her father 10 years previously. The book is filled with clever observations about life, growing up in a family full of secrets, living in a small town but what resonated most deeply was Edwards’ descriptions of grief. More specifically, how their grief affected the home...

“I felt myself drawn back to the summer after my father’s death. We’d gone through our days doing our usual things, trying to create a fragile order. We made meals we hardly touched, and passed in the halls without speaking; my mother started sleeping in the spare room downstairs, and began to close the second floor down, room by room. Her grief was at the centre of the stillness in the house, and we all moved carefully, so quietly around it; if I allowed myself to weep or rage, everything might shatter, so I held still. Even now, when I went back to visit I always felt myself falling into those old patterns, the world circumscribed by loss.”

It amazes me that more homes don’t fall down under the weight of the emotions we leave imprinted on their walls.

When Home is... feeling like you’ve already left

I’m finally reading Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader. I know, I know, where was I 10 years ago?! Anyway, as we’re on a bit of a book theme this week I thought it was a good opportunity to discuss a paragraph that really struck me (obviously there were lots of paragraphs in this book that struck me but this one pays particular reference to the idea of ‘home’ and growing up).

‘I felt as if we were sitting all together for the last time around the round table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border, as if we would never talk to each other as a family again. I felt as if I were saying goodbye. I was still there and already gone. I was homesick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I longed to be with the woman.

... I was happy. And at the same time I felt I’d just said my final goodbyes.’

For me, the line ‘I was still there and already gone’ is so eloquent and poignant; the bittersweetness of changing relationships, growing up, moving on (or out). And while the character isn’t moving anywhere literally, he is beginning to grow beyond his childhood.

My most recent memory of a similar feeling was when my first two children were four and two-years-old. I went to visit one of my oldest friends in New York for 10 days. All on my own! It was fabulous; a time spent with friends who are like family and a very special godson.

Yet the lead-up was awful. I knew rationally the children would be fine; they had their father, my mother and my mother-in-law. But I didn’t want to leave them behind.

The week before I left felt like a week of goodbyes. I was most definitely ‘still there and already gone’. I was missing the children while we were still altogether. I was homesick for people who were in the same house as me. But mentally I was already on the other side of the world without them.

There are so many circumstances in our lives when we can be physically present but mentally absent; or why we may miss the very person we are holding hands with.

I’d love to hear about more.

When Home is... a Family Recipe

Patricia Fisken hasn’t lived in Scotland for a number of years but she still takes comfort in cooking the dishes handed down through the generations of her family. ‘My family love food and any get together always and still involves food. My Grannies and Great Aunts all had their signature dishes, which were brought out on every family occasion. My mum has continued this tradition and I hope to do the same.’

Food is so closely tied with Patricia’s sense of family that she compiled a ‘family recipe book’ a few Christmases ago. Recipes from her immediate and extended family were included and Patricia was amazed at how many people sent her the same recipe, which reminded them of that relative. ‘The other interesting thing was the realisation that some recipes had travelled the length and breadth of the world.’

One such recipe is her Granny Thornton's shortbread. ‘There was a moment of panic when neither my mum nor I could find the shortbread recipe and we contacted everyone we knew who may have it. Finally, a relative in Australia sent it over to us saying Granny made it on one of her visits to Britain and she loved it so much that she got the recipe.’

For Patricia, this recipe in particular evokes strong childhood memories. ‘We always visited Granny for the summer school holidays and I distinctly remember the smell of her shortbread (always freshly baked just before our arrival) wafting down the stairway as we approached her house. Granny's shortbread was very distinctive. It had a marzipan-like taste, due to the almond essence she put in it.’

‘It was such a comforting smell and full of promise: of hours sitting with her while she reminisced over photos of her exotic life.’

Exotic stories included how she ran away from her strict convent school to join the South African Women's Army. ‘It was on an army ship out to Egypt that she met my grandfather, a Major in the British Army. He was 20 years her senior and engaged to someone else, but my granny was a very alluring young woman and she ended up capturing his heart and becoming his wife. After the war they settled in Kenya, where they ran a coffee plantation and raised three young children (including my dad), before being forced to move back to Britain because the Mau Mau made it too dangerous for them to stay there.’

‘It is funny how, when I baked the shortbread last Sunday, the memories all flooded back and I was in granny's house, sitting next to her on her sofa, drinking tea, eating shortbread and being enthralled by her tales of life in Africa.’

For Patricia this is the beauty of a well-loved family recipe, ‘It can transport you back to another place, one that was home for a time.’

Here is the unadulterated recipe for Granny Thornton's Shortbread:

Ingredients
3oz castor sugar
6oz butter (soft)
9oz plain flour
1tbsp ground rice or semolina
1tsp almond essence
Pinch salt

Method
Heat oven to 325 degrees fahrenheit
Mix dry ingredients together. Add butter with almond essence (chop up into small pieces with a knife first)
Work mixture with hands until resembles scone mixture
Put into a baking tin and knead into shape (in the tin)
Fork all over
Put in heated oven for half an hour
Then move to next shelf down and turn oven off. Leave for another quarter hour
Take out of oven and sprinkle with castor sugar
Cut into 8 pieces

Photo by Patricia Fisken

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.