Butterflies of a Brief Summer: Mémoires – Les Souvenirs sont faits de tels Moments

By Trish Ludgate

Is a life to be measured by decades lived, or by formative moments shared? On reflection, do we hold dearest the ephemeral nature of our experiences, each perfect in its own time and place?

The writer shares the stories that shaped her personal journey from a simple childhood in post-World War II Australia, to a gradual and ultimately intensive experience of the world and its complexities as a member of Australia’s diplomatic corps. A light-hearted autobiography set in places as diverse as Australia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Poland and Tanzania, with escapades through many lands in between.

“Embrace each perfect moment. Hold no expectation. All is a gift.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Dec 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925529371

Trish Ludgate

Trish Ludgate was born into post-World War II Australia after her father’s return from service with Australian forces in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea. The family felt lucky to be living a simple life in a peaceful suburb of outer Sydney, its cohesion provided by a loving and selfless mother. The third of four children, in a pre-television era, she somehow knew life promised more.Starting work at sixteen, she watched as colleagues travelled beyond Australia. “Will I see you in London one day?” was a chance remark from one of those colleagues that gave her permission to believe this might just be possible. With practical support from her employers, her travels began tentatively at age 21, as a shy girl on an ocean liner headed for London. The journey continued for many decades, including ten years employed in the Australian diplomatic service living in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Poland, UK and Iraq. She realised her childhood dream of learning to fly planes during her time in Africa.During her travels Trish met her partner, Australian musician Roger Woodward. They share the great joy of a son Ben, and adopted son, Elroy, now accomplished adults each viewing the world through their own lenses of experience. She remains close to her siblings, their shared childhood experiences and their extended families.Trish continued her studies as mother of a young child. She has since worked for many years as a manager in the Australian performing arts industry, a position she regards as a privilege, extending her travels and experiences beyond those covered in this memoir.

Book preview

Butterflies

of a

Brief Summer

Mémoires – les souvenirs sont faits de tels moments

by

Patricia Ludgate

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO BOX 147

Hazelbrook NSW 2779

http://www.indiemosh.com.au/

  Copyright 2016 © Patricia Ludgate

All rights reserved

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Dedication

I think of my life not as decades lived,

but as a montage of magical moments;

of experiences, each perfect in its own time and place;

ephemeral, yet forever embraced.

I am the sum of those moments, intrinsically enriched by those who created them with me.

To those treasured influences I dedicate these reminiscences, in the quiet belief some of the magic might be shared.

CHAPTER ONE:

The Magic Carpet

The Ship to Everywhere – Date: 1965

I could feel my heart beating wildly inside my chest, as I stood in the comforting sanctuary of the ship’s deck in the pre-dawn chill, experiencing my first sounds, sights and smells of Europe. We were about to dock at the awakening port of Lisbon in Portugal after a six-week sea journey during which I had constantly to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t in a dream. I didn’t know it at the time, but this quiet moment – of all that were to come – would remain with me all my life. It was then I transitioned from a naïve young girl to a budding woman of the world. Penniless and clueless, somehow I knew this would be no short trip and there would be no turning back. Inexplicably I felt it was my world out there and I couldn’t wait to embrace it.

What had brought me to this point? No-one in my family had ever travelled voluntarily, except my mother’s brother who was a ship’s captain. Travelling then was not commonplace, nor cheap. Plane travel was for the rich, or for important businessmen. There was no instant communication and letters took weeks to arrive; our family installed a home phone only after I had started work. In fact it had been a preposterous comment from a work colleague when I was 19, as he left to travel overseas, which had allowed me to believe I just might be able to do that too. Will I see you in London one day, Patricia? he had asked casually.

Seventh November 1965 was the day I turned 21, entitling me to ‘the key to the door’, as the saying was then. However two days later, after an unusually extravagant birthday party at home with many relatives and friends, I found myself – as if in a dream – boarding the P&O Liner Arcadia at Circular Quay in Sydney, Australia. The girl who had never ventured far from mother or from home was about to leave that front door far behind and sail away to lose herself in that big unknown: the world.

Only now, decades on, can I begin to understand what emotion my poor mother must have been feeling at that moment. Although travelling totally alone I felt neither fear nor apprehension, only a stunning excitement to think that this could actually be happening to me. I remarked to myself on the power of writing down a goal. I earned only £9 a week, paid board to my family and my daily transport and yet here I stood. I had miraculously saved the £453 for the fare. I had my return ticket on the ship should anything go wrong, £100 in my handbag (thanks to my generous employers who gave me both the bag and the bonus as well as an introduction to a workplace in London) and a friend’s parents to make contact with in the UK – everything was just great!

Ahead of me, for the next six weeks, the previously only dreamed-about exotic locations of Auckland, Suva, Pago Pago, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Acapulco, Panama Canal, Cartagena, Trinidad, Lisbon, Le Havre and finally London. I had voraciously read about those destinations in every document I could find. Now I felt I was on a magic carpet whisking me away to only-to-be-imagined experiences. The ship’s horn saluted goodbye to all I knew and loved and the streamers gradually broke as we pulled slowly away from the quay.

That magic carpet had seemed to be spinning out of control: we had smelled the odours of the bubbling mud of Rotorua, sipped kava with the friendliest people in the Pacific in Fiji, caught a local bus to escape hawkers in tourist-mad Samoa, crossed the Equator before being feted in Hawaii with some hula dancing and visiting TV-fed places of curiosity. We had sailed next to the Golden Gate Bridge and caught cable cars to Nob Hill in dreamy San Francisco, hired a Chevrolet Impala for $10 a day in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and spent hours at Disneyland. In San Diego I had opted for a home-stay with the Burnhams, a most hospitable and talented family, with whom I would remain in contact for years.

We had paused in Mexico to watch the dazzling cliff divers at magnificent Acapulco and had enjoyed the fascinating experience of our huge ship being lifted through the various locks of the Panama Canal – the whole transit from Balboa to Colon taking 7-1/2 hours. Then I experienced my first confrontation with real poverty during a short day in the ancient city of Cartagena in Columbia, a town ringed by a wall 40 feet thick, built to ward off pirates in the 16th century. It seemed to me that nothing had since changed and I retreated back thankfully to my particular bastion of safety. And then we were sailing in the magical Caribbean, to Trinidad in the West Indies, surrounded by limbo dancers and steel drums. Lisbon, Le Havre and Southampton loomed close as we crossed into the Atlantic amid the promise of rough seas to inhibit the usual night’s dancing.

Setting foot with my newfound buddies on European soil a short time after dawn, we boarded a coach for a trip to Sintra. My avid reading had unearthed a Portuguese proverb, which indicated that to miss Sintra when travelling the world would be unthinkable. So, leaving Lisbon, we began to climb, passing classic blue-tiled cottages and waking villagers. Then we suddenly entered the world of the Brothers Grimm, one I had never really believed existed – winding cobblestoned streets, buildings with castle-like turrets, small cottages clinging miraculously to hillsides. After my first-ever tour of a European palace with all its riches, we had manoeuvred our coach to a stop to buy some irresistible freshly-baked pastries from a woman in a long black skirt, in a Brothers Grimm-like shop. Then came a moment I would never forget – in the still misty morning a large black coach being drawn by two white horses clip-clopped at speed down the narrow cobbled street, passed in front of us and vanished around the corner. In this particular fairytale, the Sydney suburb of Fairfield where I spent my childhood seemed a very long way away indeed. I longed to stay suspended in that fleeting moment for as long as I could.

Saying goodbye to Lisbon was as if parting from a newly-discovered friend and I vowed I’d be back. We had a rough crossing of the Bay of Biscay and were joined in Le Havre by various customs officials after which we lost all our European mates. All too soon came the farewell dance party and Southampton. It felt as if a lifetime had been telescoped into a kaleidoscope of brilliantly coloured moments.

Now I was faced also with saying goodbye to Gasper from Goa, my caring and omnipresent Cabin Steward. He had taken care of me as if I were one of his daughters and I had felt protected and secure throughout the journey. But soon he would be turning around for another voyage and I’d be abandoned. We had enjoyed many discussions about Goa, his life, his family and his job, which he did so very well. I took some of my meagre wealth and left him what I thought to be a good tip.

As I stepped off the ship there was, surprisingly, a message from my friend’s family – the only contacts I had on this side of the world other than my letter of introduction to prospective new employers. It was soon to be Christmas and they had unexpectedly travelled to London to meet me at Waterloo Station to be sure I was safely settled into my hotel in Earls Court. In the unfamiliar vastness of this now grey and cold city, I felt immensely grateful to them as they whisked me away in my first London cab through a maze of red double-decker buses.

Behind me, the miracles of the last six weeks; ahead of me, the challenges of a new and independent life in London.

The next phase of my journey had begun.

CHAPTER TWO:

The Microcosm, Childhood

Date: 1950s

By the time I reached ten years of age I had experienced very little exposure to any world outside our simple family life, yet somehow I knew deep down there had to be something more. I wasn’t unhappy, but neither did I feel contentment. I felt restless, out of place somehow, wanting something, but had no idea quite what.

In the 1950s, Fairfield, to the west of Sydney, was a quiet bush suburb. Its residents felt blessed to be able to recover from the privations of the Second World War and to live their lives in a basic fibro home on a quarter-acre block.

Our family owned a double block, extending – as we children thought then – into the mysterious and quite scary wilderness beyond our clothesline. Occasionally we would venture into that maze of bushes, trees and long grass, but only when another was on watch for the large blue-tongued lizard that lay in wait, to ensure we would emerge safely.

Our home cost our parents £1,100 (Australian currency was then pounds, shillings and pence) and took them a lifetime to pay off. Later in life my mother was to observe that I paid as much for built-in wardrobes as she and dad had paid for their home. My mother, Hazel, never worked – her parents, who were loving, believed formal education was not necessary for a young woman, and as much as she craved learning all her life she was obliged to leave school when she was twelve. She was a petite woman who had been born prematurely in the early 1900s weighing 1.5 pounds and was put to bed in a pudding basin lined with cotton wool. What mum lacked in size she made up for in spirit and humour. She had however one quiet unrealised dream – before her death at the age of 94 she confided in me that she had only ever wanted one thing more in life – to be a hairdresser! I was shocked. Such a modest ambition had not been realised, nor even voiced, because ‘girls didn’t need to go to work’. Mum had not once in our lifetime said to me I want so and so, or what about me? She was, quite simply, a saint. Her brothers went on to professions in the Navy, real estate and manufacture. My father worked as a scientific engineer, fixing delicate scientific instruments. He had served constantly overseas during the Second World War in the Middle East and Borneo. He had left Mum with two sons during the war years, and my sister and I arrived when the war ended. She struggled with the boys during those years, taking in a boarder, and spending some of the time at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains with her parents.

We children knew little of anything beyond our neighbourhood. Television did not arrive into Australia until 1956, when I was twelve, and not into our home until much later. We would bake a cake and spend Friday or Saturday nights as a family with our neighbour who was lucky enough to have a television set. A steady diet of US cowboy programs, being exposed for the first time to the horrors of red Indians and scalpings, are my main memory of that social event, along with Mrs Nolan’s chocolate cake with raspberry jam inside.

We did have a radio, or course, and at 5.30 every night would gather beside it to listen to Jason and the Argonauts (what Aussie child of that generation was not an Argonaut, I wonder?), Tarzan, Biggles, and Green Bottle’s, Good Morning Sir!

The boys, Rob and Terry, being six and eight years older respectively, did much more grown-up things than my sister, Ros, and I – such as going to the movies and out with their friends. We girls contented ourselves with dressing up our kittens in knitted baby clothes, putting them in our prams and wheeling them around the garden. Occasionally one would escape into the bushes wearing its bonnet and dress. Our dog, Spot, was extremely clever at jumping through a hoop after hours of training. Such were the simple pleasures of young girls.

Our milk was delivered in the early hours of the morning into our billy can, which we left covered on the front veranda each night. Sometimes the slugs would discover it before we did. The advent of milk delivered in bottles was a miracle. A cry of bottle-o meant that the man with his horse and cart was trawling the neighbourhood for empty bottles, for which he paid something like one penny a dozen. The big block of ice for our ‘ice box’ was similarly delivered via horse and cart. This was the only ingredient for our ‘drip safe’ – something like a covered-in birdcage which hung on the veranda and which allowed blocks of ice to cool the air as it passed through and kept the contents of the safe chilled. In it were stored milk, butter, meat and other perishables. We earned pocket money by taking old newspapers to the fish and chip shop on the corner and being rewarded again with a penny. Three pennies bought a tiny ice-cream, a treat every Friday; sixpence secured a battered sav – a greasy sausage which was also a Friday night treat with a few potato scallops.

Our elderly aunt would visit regularly, and being a spinster squandered her pension on buying us a bottle of Coca Cola and an apple turnover with cream. I then regarded it as the perfect culinary combination. We would sit on the back step and eat in silence so as to fully appreciate the magnificence of the taste and become annoyed if our brothers interrupted the moment. Such luxuries were only dreamed about during the war years – how lucky we were!

We had a cool and welcoming willow tree at our front fence, which my sister often sat in for hours, reading, and a huge peppercorn tree in our backyard. Beyond the peppercorn tree was our ‘outhouse’, or toilet. These were pre-sewerage days, when the ‘nightman’ would come and take away the waste. Why we were not chronically constipated is a mystery to me, such was the challenge at night to venture into the loo. The torch rendered it all quite spooky but it was necessary to be on the lookout for spiders that loved to live in there. My sister and I had a pact that one would stand guard whilst the other was busy.

I became aware of death through two shattering events. The first was our dog Spot, who got a tick in his ear and despite its being removed, died a painful death surrounded by the helpless family. The notion of paying for a vet was out of the question. Then a mysterious old lady moved in two doors down – our insularity left us unaware she was Greek. She dressed only in hot-looking black clothes and would smile when I peeked at her. Her family set about growing strange vegetables and raising chickens. It eventually became obvious that the chickens were destined for the chopping block, and my curiosity was rewarded one day when I saw a headless chook flying around the yard. The horrifying memory stayed with me for years. It wasn’t helped by my tormenting brothers who one day chased me around the house with the head of an unfortunate chook. So hysterical did I become that I locked myself in the bathroom and refused to come out despite my mother’s pleading. The Greek lady’s goat occasionally escaped to find our willow tree – I would watch it eating the leaves with such relish it made me want to try them myself. I got too close to the goat one day and was rewarded with a head butt in the stomach.

Summers were very hot. When the thermometer hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit we would all be sent home from school. Mother would always say Oh, thank goodness, here comes the Southerly – the wind that came from the south to relieve the heat of the day. One particular summer the ground in our backyard became dry and cracked; the cracks became larger and spiders and insects seemed to emerge from them. We were unaware that this was unusual. It was just how it was. It meant we would put the sprinkler on the hose on the front lawn, put on our swimmers and run in and out of the water, avoiding the sharp bindi-eyes in the grass and shrieking with joy. Being fair skinned, I burnt and blistered easily and my shirt would sometimes stick to the blisters. There was no sun-block nor sun protection awareness.

In the afternoon we would all migrate to the small front veranda, where we’d sit to catch the breeze; Nana and Mum would have ‘freshened up’ – put on their afternoon dresses, fixed their hair and had an hour or two’s relaxation before the evening meal. Our persistence in sitting on the porch walls would always engender terror into our grandmother – despite the fact that the drop to the ground was no more than five feet.

My father became the proud possessor of a racing green Chrysler box-like car with running boards. We would pile in and go for a drive on Sunday – my mother’s only ‘outing’. We would drive to the local river, where there was a park with swings and a fenced-in swimming pool. Mum’s special treat was a ‘spider’ – lemonade with ice-cream – something she loved all her life. Every evening, before Dad was due home from work, she would put on a fresh dress, fix her hair and her lipstick and prepare for his return. By then she would have done all the housework, coped with four children and animals, worried about the budget, prepared the evening meal and done the washing in her copper. The water had to be boiled, the sheets and towels dunked into it with a wooden stick and then fed through a hand wringer to dry them out before pegging on the line. Only many years later did we get a double-barrel washing machine – one side for washing, the other for spinning. Mother must have felt released from slavery. She would prepare dinner without complaint, and without our appreciating how financially challenging it was, quite often more than one meal to cater for different family tastes and any friends who might happen to be there at mealtime. The boys’ friends were always welcome (ours were younger and not yet so free), and as a result our house was always full of young people.

At some stage my Mother’s parents came to live with us. By then grandfather was totally blind – a tree branch had poked him in the eye some years previously and he had done nothing about it. He was a lovely, educated and gentle soul, who would sit for hours reading his braille books. How the young can waste such a resource! We would try so hard not to ask him any homework question, because we would then have to sit for what seemed like hours to get the answer. Nana was becoming frail, so in addition to all of us, Mum also had the care of her parents. Somehow we made the house expand to fit us all. The boys moved out to an enclosed end of the veranda where they slept in double bunks. One night there was a scream and my brother came running inside, probably not swearing since it was then not allowed. A possum living in the roof had peed through the unlined ceiling onto his bed. As a child I loved being tucked up in my bed listening to the nocturnal steam train clickety-clacking its way towards the Blue Mountains and beyond, delivering its freight from Sydney to more isolated locations in the west of the state. If I was very lucky, the whistle might blow.

Winter evenings were spent around the open fire, reading or playing board games, or listening to the radio and doing homework. My brother always did his homework with two or three kittens climbing around the inside of his jumper and settling across his shoulders. I don’t remember any topical family discussions on politics, economics, or world affairs. We attended no cultural events. We had no knowledge of a world beyond our small sphere. Our father obviously did, but he never spoke of it. Every face we saw was white. The movies were a treat once a month, whenever our brothers ‘allowed’ us to go with them. We went to school, came home, played with friends, and went for a Sunday drive or to visit relatives, some of whom lived in much more elite suburbs than ours. We had a lot of relatives and many elderly great aunts still surviving from a family of 18 girls.

One day we were taken to a musical production. We had always had Nana’s piano in our living room. My sister, then very young, came home, sat down at the piano and proceeded to play (with both hands!) all the tunes from the production. She had just discovered she had a special talent for playing pieces ‘by ear’. The younger of my brothers was very skilled at drawing. My forte in those days was baking a chocolate cake, for which I won prizes at school and church fetes. My eldest brother was especially talented with mechanics.

My sister and I went to a small local primary school and learned to dance the maypole for special events. My maypole colours were pale green and pink, and to this day I love that combination.

Some unexplained tension in the home found we girls travelling by train to Brisbane in the state of Queensland with Mum, where we stayed with her brother’s family for some months, going to the local school. We found it huge and impersonal, and never quite understood the dynamics of our home situation. We would never have asked and just did as we were bid until returning back to dad and the boys – and a litter of new kittens – and resuming our old life.

When we reached High School age we had to travel one station on the train to Fairfield Girls High School. As a reward for entering high school, my parents had saved up and bought me a wristwatch. I had never owned anything so sophisticated. This was a ‘new’ school – the boys and the girls sharing the same location. This meant we could combine for things like the annual Gilbert and Sullivan Opera production. With my quiet nature, plaits, freckles and spectacles (and lack of a confident singing voice) want as I might, I was never selected to contribute to this production and would sit outside on the step, listening to the rehearsals. An enlightened teacher might have put my willingness to some useful purpose at least, but not then. My sister however was selected for The Gondoliers – the social event of our young lives.

As a student it never occurred to me not to study to pass my exams. In primary school I’d been in the habit of telling the teacher when I wanted to go home (sometimes as early as 1.30pm because I missed my mother). High School was much different and although I had one or two friends it was largely a time for learning and work. I wasn’t an intuitive student, but I never failed an exam. Mrs Lowe – my English and history teacher for the three