Little pools of sunshine.

The real estate agent suggested a gardener. I declined. A gardener tends gardens. This is a jungle. So I would take a hedge trimmer and a ‘lawn’ mower and make little pools of sunshine where before there was only scrub, overhang, bramble, thicket. (That makes it sound like it hadn’t been touched for years: far from it. I had been hacking away at its turbo-powered growth for more than ten years. It’s a legacy of the dear departed’s vision for a completely untrammelled garden, Alexander Pope’s ‘unadorned nature’ on steroids.)

So no gardener. Nor a stylist. The house will most likely be demolished. A stylist would just be demoralised, like a make-up artist asked to work on a condemned man.

So I cut and slash and the years fall to the ground along with the branches and twigs and leaves. ‘One-owner house,’ will project the auctioneer, all grey suit and sharp hair and rolled-up auction blurb to slap on his other hand at ‘sold’. I wrote copy for an estate agent at the turn of the century; kind of a favour, a paid favour, of course. Real estate agents write fine blurbs about the houses they sell, but some of their clients wanted real copywriters to elevate their properties to mythical level.  Turned out to be kind of an end-to-end life devotion to the industry; in teenage years I had delivered calendars for W. J. Harper. No fridge magnets then; they were of coated white cardboard and they had little punched holes in the top for hanging on a nail. 

The years fell to the ground as I slashed and mowed.

Here grew radishes, when strawberry fields was where you were going to, in a sectioned-off bed fertilised by horse manure collected by my father from country roadsides in a decade when horses passed by as a matter of course; here, an incinerator adapted from a forty-four gallon drum, with an air ingress and ash removal window cut into its base. Here, a treehouse way up in the boughs of an old peach tree where an HMV radio that I had stolen from the kitchen told me that Bill Ryan had sat on a pack like a fat Buddha and taken the mark of the ’60s. I saw it happen because my ears painted pictures better than any eyes. On another tree day, some forgotten announcer gave the winner of Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds and why should I remember that? Its aural reality might have aligned with the newsprint poster - Doug Parkinson In Focus? - from Go-Set (the weekly pop newspaper) my brother had taped to our bedroom wall. That year, it irrelevantly occurred to me as I mowed a sunlit yellow path through a deep green patch,  someone gave me a blotting pad as a tenth birthday present. Not unusual; items of stationery were appreciated gifts. We wrote with pens. In 1972 Piping Lane galloped right down the middle of the garden to win the Melbourne Cup, followed by twenty more horses. Light Fingers had done the same a few years earlier while I sat on the lawn over which a few years later my father would build the art studio. And before that I'd won a civil war - not sure whose - with the help of a plastic rifle and a raised flag, behind the old shed near the apple tree, in the shade of which the pages of Puffins were turned at summer's close, when it seemed that all good things must end and autumn leaves must fall. In this apple-tree-shaded place relief flooded my Puffined mind at hearing the rising roar echoing off house wall and side fence of a car’s early evening return, as if by automotive memory. The relief that flooded over me was that my father hadn’t died on the way home in some terrible car accident, and I still haven’t figured why such anxiety should afflict a ten-year-old. When, alive and well, he went inside the house, I stole the afternoon Herald from his chair where he’d just placed it. He was alive, he could cope with that.

I cut and slashed the garden and the memories with it and it worked quite well. More Edna Wallace than Paul Bangay, but at least you could put a deck chair in one of those pools of sunshine - a glade, in the vocabulary of more literate times - open a book, and hear in the middle distance, the hushing, howling white noise of the passing decades. Not that anyone will. It will be demolished.