Lines from New Zealand

By Lolly Fairweather

On a dull Tuesday morning in early October 2008, I lost my battle to save our business and property—a French provincial styled restaurant and homestead on a vineyard estate—and with it my job, my reputation, my balance, my clout, my life’s savings, my mind—my life as I knew it. Afterwards, I began writing like a madwoman, and in time a book took shape describing a myriad of experiences and the long journey back to just being me.

After our epic loss, we lived for a year in one of the highest houses in Christchurch with an unparalleled view of the Pacific Ocean and the curved coastline. That house of Up Above Down Under and those mercurial skies saved my life. We now live in The House of Cluck-Cluck where I still spend endless hours in our rambling country garden as I dig in the soil tenaciously for answers about my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528955508

Lolly Fairweather

Lolly Fairweather moved from Southern California to the New Zealand countryside with her Kiwi husband and three-year-old son in late 1994. This book is her poignant and rather wry chronicle of her adventures and misadventures Down Under, both before and after losing everything.

Book preview

About the Author

Lolly Fairweather moved from Southern California to the New Zealand countryside with her Kiwi husband and three-year-old son in late 1994. This book is her poignant and rather wry chronicle of her adventures and misadventures Down Under, both before and after losing everything.

Dedication

My mother believed in me non-stop. In her view, I could conquer anything. We were inseparable, born on the same day, and there was never a cross word between us. My father and I had a different relationship. He was logical, restrained, and more at ease working his way through some engineering challenge than dealing with his three girls, but we all knew he loved us. Most of my childhood was blissful, thanks to them. So anything I’ve somehow managed to accomplish in my life must certainly be attributed to them, for they let me be myself: an emotionally charged, slightly off-beat, and strident over-achiever with a penchant for rambling gardens, old houses, certain people, and animals.

Having been a creature of ‘place’ all my life, I did my best to recreate the feelings I lived with inside our family home, as I transformed many properties into loving sanctuaries. The imprints I unconsciously picked up from my folks became my blueprint, and I attached great sentiment to all of my houses and the disparate collections that graced them.

This book is dedicated to their memory with the hope of neutralizing some of my most bittersweet recollections that still haunt me. Having enjoyed exceptional recall of events, my life has become a mixed blessing in the low years.

Postscript

My deepest thoughts have been marinating for many years. Some of us learn from making a mistake or two, but not me. My misadventures take me years to get over and learn from, if I even can. Perspective is a funny thing. It doesn’t appear automatically on command but takes the time it takes to show up, just like my book. I began writing down my observations about my life after a major upheaval that left residues of unfathomable pain for me to sift through. But my sifting has taken many side roads, like my life itself.

Eventually, I did find a publisher after working for a while with an editor who was going to hook me up with publishers he himself had used. But by the time the manuscript was at that stage, the marketplace had dramatically morphed and all the old contacts were long gone. When I did locate a suitable company, seemingly endless medical issues reared their ugly heads and my progress continued to stop and start many times over. Now with our world in a state of flux, I’m finally nearing the publishing date and more unknowns to ponder after this long sought accomplishment.

Not having any clues about promoting this, I’m feeling a bit like a fish out of water, but I will proceed forward in my own silly way to finally put these personal memoirs to rest with the public’s scrutiny. It is a scary but necessary process and it’s certainly overdue, like a library book from a decade ago. Hopefully, some readers might identify with some of my own crises that I write about and perhaps even relate to a few of my more personal insights about my life that I share here. Though reclusive for years, I’ve certainly exposed myself to the outside world with this book and now it’s time to put all these daunting memories and endless regrets behind me. But I’ll keep all the sentiments for good measure.

Copyright Information ©

Lolly Fairweather 2021

The right of Lolly Fairweather to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788783910 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788783927 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528955508 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2021

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I’ve been immersed in my story for far too many years. Explaining myself, going over and over what happened that my wrong moves put into action, a minor faux pas here, a major one there and suddenly, all I had was my confessional in my journal, where I poured out my heart onto my computer keys. Eventually a book started to emerge but it’s taken over a decade to find my balance. Had it not been for my dearest family and a few friends, I wouldn’t have made it through these troubled times nor gotten this project off the ground. But spurred on by their insights, I found my voice. Their backup has been the glue that kept me from giving up.

All of their feedback has helped me immeasurably. Thanks, of course, must also go to my husband, John, for putting up with me through all these years of almost unbearable self-doubt. You’re all in my heart.

Prologue

My name is Wendy Laurelee Fairweather, but my mother dubbed me Lollypop when I came home from the hospital and it stuck. She always said I was such a sweetie and soon everyone in the family began calling me Lolly. Once I started school though everyone knew me as Laurelee, never Wendy and only occasionally as Lolly. As a child in sunny California, I was the happiest little girl, just bursting with exuberance. There seemed to be a golden light around me, protecting me from all unseen forces, like that boogeyman that lived in my closet. Because I felt so safe, I never saw what was coming from that roller coaster of experiences awaiting me in the nebulous void called the future. I’d always expected my life would continue to be manageable after I grew up. In fact, I thought that becoming an adult guaranteed control of one’s life forever.

But from my teens onward, there were major upheavals every few years. Although I got through them, the onslaught of those losses took their toll. I managed to survive devastating betrayals and life-altering sea changes but deep down I remained adrift until I met my second husband. Yet, even with all the blessings we’ve found together in America and New Zealand, most of what we worked for all our lives was lost just as our business was going into its best season when our cherished homestead on fifteen acres, our rustic restaurant, vineyard, orchard, and gardens were all wrenched from us. Disheartened, we left our land and most of our animals and settled into a 1920s hideaway on the other side of town. It was high up above the fray and away from our lost property. We stayed there a year, licking our wounds and staring at the sea, then shifted an hour’s drive north to a tumbledown farm manager’s shanty, riddled with borer.

Today, my expansive gardens at our tiny, rented, weather-beaten, weatherboard, 100-plus-year-old farm cottage look as messy as the events that led me here. As I write this, it’s late winter and nature isn’t finished with us yet. Everything outside has been reduced to its barest bones, but a few cheeky blooms refuse to yield to the vagaries of the weather. Inside our modest home, our lives, too, have been considerably reduced, although I’ve crammed in as many memories of past glory as I can bear to look at. Not exactly the dream ending I’d anticipated.

These are my unabridged recollections of our life here with flashbacks of my early years. But like an urn filled with the vestiges of what once was a life, I hope to scatter these memories back into the earth to finally remove their unrelenting hold over me.

I just never pictured myself living an ordinary life. My dreams have always seemed rather large. I somehow landed here at the bottom of the planet with my three-year-old miracle boy, Jake, and my Kiwi bloke husband, John. I’d entertained vague visions of a simple life on the land without the distractions of a sprawling Los Angeles around me, but I underestimated the impact of not having my dearest family a short distance away. They’d always been my backstop but urged on by my mate who was pining to move back to his homeland, I felt ready for an epic change. It was to be one of my most engaging challenges in a strange new world, Down Under, where even the English vernacular spoken here was incomprehensible to my American ears. I actually believed that all I needed was the love of a good man and the staggering physical beauty of the land and sky and sea; that everything else would somehow fall into place as I found my balance. After a lifetime of testing myself, I never imagined the profound difficulties that would lie ahead as I made my way through our antipodean adventure.

Book One

Up Above Down Under

Chapter 1: Up Above Down Under

I came to New Zealand in late August 1994 with a little boy named Jake and a middle-aged man named John, who comes from here. I was 49 and raring to get started, living my idyllic country life in the middle of nowhere, sixty miles from the city of Christchurch, where land is abundant and people are scarce. My life in Los Angeles had been exceptionally dramatic with incredible highs and lows, which I thought might even out if I recreated myself anew.

John wanted to come home to live after being away for a quarter of a century and I grabbed the gold ring with all my might, hopeful that I’d thrive with him.

Most of the time spent in this remarkable country has been absolutely wonderful, though tinged with longings to go back to my homeland, my roots, my family. Through it all I’ve somehow managed to survive—my saving grace most of my adult life. But in late 2008 we stumbled big time and were forced to leave our home and close our stunning restaurant on our vineyard estate just south of the city. Being 64, I wasn’t prepared to lose everything I’d worked for and wasn’t particularly gracious as we exited the haven we’d created. Devastated that we’d lost the fight to remain on our property we slunk away after being brutalized by a vindictive lender. Somehow, I’d misread the cues from the worldwide credit crunch; naively I expected I’d attract enough funding to see us through in the short term until our forward bookings kicked in. I foolishly underestimated the clout of the third-tier lenders who held our lives in their hands. In the end, it was a matter of being undercapitalized and in bed with the wrong crowd who didn’t care enough to give us a few more weeks to get to the cash infusion we needed to pay them off.

As I begin jotting down these memoirs, I am sitting in an old veranda cum lounge, impervious to the weather’s battering, just above the summit road. Years ago, the house was taken over by the army because of its strategic location with a view of the coastline of Pegasus Bay and all the way up to Kaikoura, a couple of hundred miles away. After the war, it reverted to being just a hilltop home, a sanctuary for its residents, and in time was purchased by a couple who spent many years here doing up the gardens on the surrounding three acres of bush and terraced pathways. The woman threw herself and about $60,000 into the project, beautifying the steep site, but her passions were extinguished by a terminal illness. That’s when her grieving husband, who couldn’t bear to live here without her, sold the property to the current owners. They rent it to us because the landlord’s wife refuses to live this high up, this far from other people, this remote from the conveniences of the flatlands.

Within a few days of finding out that we had to vacate our cherished vineyard property, we came up here on a very stormy afternoon via the winding and windy summit road. As John drove, I seemed to be cemented to the door handle, which I clutched in horror as we ascended in what seemed to be hurricane-force winds that made our car shimmy and shake around every bend; powerful enough to push the old BMW over the cliff edge for most of the journey. At one point, John stopped and told me to go lie down on the back seat and behave, as if that would keep me from having the worst anxiety attack ever in a vehicle. But I refused to budge: I didn’t want to get out of the car on that narrow road in that gale to either fall over the cliff or be hit by an oncoming car. It was only by the grace of God that we didn’t plunge to our demise and somehow we arrived. John and Jake then jumped out of the car, probably trying to get away from me, but I needed a few minutes to calm my racing heart so I wouldn’t appear as nervous as I occasionally am under harrowing circumstances.

Even as I opened the car door I felt enchanted, as if I’d stepped into a magical land. The view of the sea in the background was all encompassing yet it merged with the natural gardens smoothly: several gravel pathways lead to different levels in various directions. The entrance to the driveway was quite steep but once over the hump it became a more moderate descent as we curved around to the front of the three-car garage. Wherever I looked I saw inviting terraced plantings. The wide brick stairway led us down to the house, again with an ocean view to die for through the trees off the front deck of the rather plain exterior clad in dark timber, looking quite nondescript, giving nothing away of the interior of the bungalow reminiscent of Cape Cod, seamlessly planted on its spot on a level plateau. Once inside though I was transfixed even more as I entered the modest, light-infused white kitchen with honey-colored wooden cabinets. Two skylights, French doors, and different sets of windows made this room so bright that I knew my many ivy plants would grow abundantly in this ideal space. Although small in comparison to my other kitchens, this room works for me and my food tastes divine because of it. The quality of the cooking seems to match the quality of the light.

The kitchen leads to a center hallway with one very spacious bathroom on the left that’s not done exactly to our tastes but, like the kitchen, is a fabulous room. The huge tub is positioned next to the towering, wood-framed frosted window, which opens easily to let in the freshest air; there’s also a roomy shower, a good-sized wooden linen cupboard and oodles of countertop for all our grooming necessities. Plus, there’s considerable wall space for my large freestanding circa 1910 cupboard ripped out of a local house just before it was demolished. I’ve filled it with the rest of our beauty supplies, toiletries and such, topped with an interesting array of old bottles and miscellaneous—lots of miscellaneous. Across from this room is the master bedroom, again, like most of the rooms it has Arts and Crafts features in the extensive woodwork, with another set of French doors leading to the front deck and a huge picture window showing off the mesmerizing vista to the vast ocean below. This faces east so we glimpse the first rays of the morning sun every day shining through the branches of the lovely old Australian wattle as we awaken. Not too shabby for a rental.

Further down the hallway and to the left past the bathroom are two small, narrow bedrooms with sizable windows facing the back garden. John has his toys in one, and Jake’s room is just beyond that. On the right side, almost opposite Jake’s bedroom, is our den with a similar view out the picture window to the one we enjoy from our bedroom, a corner fireplace to keep the room cozy and French doors connecting to our dining area, which is part of an enclosed veranda that used to be the front porch of the house. There’s a heavy coating of shellac on the shiny golden-hued floorboards and the joins around the timber are outlined in black, giving the room a maritime feel. The dining area is narrow but in here all the walls are a creamy beige color with painted white trim around the small, nine-paned window looking out to sea. This compact space is quite dreamy and mirrors the dramatic and mercurial weather that can be sunny one minute and completely enclosed in fog a few moments later. The dining area merges into the spacious lounge, which has a shared wall of windows and highly polished timbered French doors leading to our largest deck with another view of the sea up the coastline and a much-loved wood burner on the opposite wall.

This living room is where I write. My desk is pushed up to one of the considerable windows letting the view outstretched before me generate massive doses of inspiration. From here I can see the huge trees on the perimeter of our property, past the mix of cabbage trees and the canopy of branches from the lovely old sycamore that’s just outside the window, and up the coast. This vantage point has changed my perspective from the inside out just as I changed my outer reality to match my inner vision. In the last few months, I’ve felt these alterations push the bitter recent past aside. Although there’s no finite demarcation of when our lives actually begin anew, I know mine has already started to in this spellbinding place, in this house of hopeful enlightenment.

Having lived most of my life waiting for something or other to happen I must say it’s a lot easier just being in the here and now—and much less tiring. Somewhere in the last jumble of days and nights in this year after the loss of our life of propertied wealth and a dynamic business to run I have wrestled my life back from the edge of beyond. Something finally penetrated my thick skull. Something I’d practiced so many thousands of days ago. Despite my relative success with these practices, these habits, these ways of dealing with life and finding my way, I discarded them for a game of chance, a gamble with my happiness and security. With such awful odds I was a self-fulfilling prophecy as I went from happy to sad, from good to bad, on every issue of importance—with such a vengeance that even I, an experienced warrior woman, couldn’t find a way to prevail.

It’s often said that experience is the best teacher—and certain events make us so much stronger, able to leap buildings in a single bound. But this time the fall from grace was too mind-boggling to fathom. I’d lost sight of all my wayward patterns that got me into such a state in the first place and so I began the ever-so-slow process of rebuilding Lolly from the inside out. Months later I can now see far more clearly the error of my thinking that I applied in anxious doses of struggling to stay afloat. There were just too many global ifs and buts in the way of my succeeding—end of story. Well, of that story at least and now a new saga begins: one of hope and wonderment, of childlike appreciation for almost everything and, best of all, one of tremendous life-altering patterns. I’ve slowed down, gotten off the treadmill, and looked within.

I now spend quiet moments every morning in my self-dialogue meditating, and ideas spring forth almost effortlessly. These are the things I want to write about: a woman fighting for survival, losing the battle, losing herself, going down in a self-defeating depression, alone, alienated, without the company of others to bolster her or reinforce her, utterly alone. After months spent looking within a tiny spark of recognition comes creating a tiny splinter of joy. Remembering that fleeting feeling I look for more. Slowly, I drag myself from the depths of my darkness into the loving acceptance of the universe; where there are neither winners nor losers, just people living their lives. Somehow I keep remembering what I used to know about tapping into the part of me that still feels buoyant and excited about the most trivial details. Somehow my sense of humor comes back and my curiosity is reawakened as I find my way through the maze of doubts and losses and into the light. Then my intuition starts clicking in as I reconnect with my visualizing and affirming and dreaming and just being. Suddenly my mind is filled with good stuff: instead of the myriad of thoughts that bring me down, now there are thoughts that bring me up. Way up.

We live in an increasingly complex world with countless inequities. Lives are lost every day. Millions of people suffer from unfathomable poverty and are in constant distress. Who am I to complain? We’re in reasonable health. We have a decent roof over our heads and have some love to see us through. We’re really so very lucky in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter 2: Broke and Broken

I don’t know how I got here. I’m drinking red wine but any kind will do, first thing in the morning—fine with me. The world credit and loan markets are crashing like the waves near the rocks. We are being tossed and turned away from any help. I gave the listing to the wrong business brokers. Our house, land, and restaurant are easily worth $2 million but we’re only getting ludicrously low offers. God help us.

It’s almost over. We were brutalized by the Inland Revenue Department when they published a liquidation notice two weeks before our mortgagee sale. Not the nicest lot. Not in the least bit interested whether we sink or swim or even whether they get their money. It’s all out of our hands but in my mind, I still strain to see us in God’s palm.

So far, we’re losing our business, our home, our gardens, our dignity, and our reputation—along with our life’s savings. All that’s left is the barest smattering of self-belief, which isn’t enough for a goldfish to feel the least bit secure. But still in my broken heart I wonder if one of the twenty interested groups of prospective buyers might actually fight over our bit of paradise that we seem to have lost and they’ve found. In a better market, we’d have a few hundred thousand to buy a small place with a little land and maybe a barn to house the results of a lifetime of collecting. In this market, with the world turned on its ass over credit and loans and insolvency and foreclosures, we’re just another statistical bleep on the radar—hardly worth mentioning.

There’s such a fine line between success and failure. We were having our best year ever. We were also a hair’s breadth from losing everything. Our sanity left months ago. We vacillate between hysteria and depression. Our moods are like swinging doors, seemingly beyond our control. We already know that we’re just specks flying around in a bit of time and space. Must we be reminded at every turn how insignificant we are? I foolishly believed that our loan company would play fair and accept a major payment toward our arrears: we took a substantial loan using my very elderly mother-in-law’s property as collateral. But they won’t accept our payment and have charged ahead instead with this mortgagee sale while refusing to deal with us. Although I’ve approached several colleagues for temporary backing to get us over this impasse, their funds are all tied up.

Up until September it appeared that I might be winning my battle to save our premises when the IRD gave us a two-week adjournment from back taxes that I’ve been paying down, apparently too slowly. So I called an insolvency accountant, who says to look at this like a game and take it one step at a time—but even with baby steps this feels like a slow march to the gallows.

There are more unknowns to ponder every day. Meanwhile I’m on the front line of the business with an air of bravado, taking calls that turn into angry cancellations with huge refunds of deposits for weddings that won’t take place here as planned. This exposure cuts me to the quick but I must face it head on. This place, our home, my role here in this idyllic locale, our whole lives are on the line. I feel like a guppy in a sea of sharks.

Chapter 3: White Out

Snow flurries gracefully sift by the window as we awaken to the stillness of a brilliant whiteness blanketing everything in sight. I feed the few chickens that show up for their morning meal but can’t tempt many of the hens to leave the comfort of their roosts in the large pines just behind the empty chook house. That place, although warmer than outside, was abandoned after the last ferret attack, which reminds me of my own flight.

After the mortgage company shut down our vineyard restaurant well before they had the right to come onto our property in October 2008, we left our lives and our home in disgrace to live on the other side of the city. Had they waited another month or two as I begged them to do, we would have had our busiest season ever and more than paid off any arrears, but they were spooked by the world credit crisis and had no patience for us nor understanding of the hospitality industry with its ups and downs. They were third-tier lenders, charging inordinate interest rates and had no empathy. It was through no fault of our own but by our first lawyer’s inefficiency that we had to deal with them at all. The couple we’d bought the vineyard property from had kept some money in the deal and was suing us for those funds eighteen months before they were due. We approached our banker who had previously promised to refinance the whole property to repay that loan, but he wouldn’t budge a year and a half before it came due. Having the house, land, and restaurant loans all bundled together was our eventual undoing and ended up creating untenable overheads for our developing business from the increasingly expensive loans we had to take. After pouring hundreds of thousands into remodeling, branding, staffing and promoting the restaurant, we’d finally established ourselves as a big player in the area and our real-estate values were going up impressively every year—something that rarely happened in New Zealand. But short-term loans became harder and harder to find and inevitably we were caught in the fallout from the Wall Street and mortgage scams.

The business I’d built up reflected my soul because I was so captivated by the restaurant with its French essence and aesthetic perfection. Of all my properties that I transformed, this one meant the most to me, and tweaking it here or there was like falling off a log. It was such a classic design mixed so well with stunning vintage windows and earthy floors and soaring rooflines amidst a simple garden setting, relaxing yet elegant in its simplicity. Even the quality of the light there was divine. The previous owners had done a masterful job in creating it all two years earlier. The moment I saw it I knew I had to live there, for it took my heart and ran away with it. While John maintained the extensive grounds, I ran the restaurant. We’d enjoyed a fair bit of success and, after six years of operation, were just on the cusp of some major profits. Most of the local community seemed to appreciate the pains we took to provide delectable, rustic French-inspired food paired with regional wines in an almost hypnotically stunning setting. Promoting the business came easily to me and we’d been featured in many publications, on radio and television and were even piped into incoming Air New Zealand flights. I’d established a farmers’ market in our barn and had decorated the French-style restaurant with all the quirkiness I could muster. There was the most enticing chipped limestone courtyard, adjacent to the dining room, which I personalized with massive country styled planked tables and benches made from very mottled reclaimed fencing and old sale yard timber, odd bits of farm equipment, strange sculptures, old, slightly battered wagons and barrows overflowing with every plant imaginable cascading. Strawberries, lavenders, wisteria and all kinds of herbs grew out of the gravel amidst the olive trees, literally thousands of plants, an odd mix of artwork from various local artisans—all shared the unconventional yet sublime space along with glorious live music and award-winning food prepared by my extraordinary executive chef, my daughter, Julie. My son, Jeremy, had been involved with the operations for a couple of very exciting years while we were building our brand. He managed and ran the front of house brilliantly and made a tremendous contribution in his very personable way. We also put our young one, Jake, to work—mostly in the kitchen doing dishes from the time he was twelve, although, to his occasional horror, he sometimes was needed for the front of house service when we were swamped. We all pitched in. And after evening events that I ran, John and I had the heavy-duty clean up awaiting us at two in the morning when we’d vacuum the tiled floors and put the tables back to their regular configuration for the next day’s busy lunch service. With acres of leafy grapevines and a sprawling homestead behind the hedgerows near the lake, we held dreamy weddings under the rose arbors on our lawn and around the gargantuan willows attended by the errant peacock, goose, chicken, duckling, or occasional pussycat. Some couples preferred to tie the knot on the chipped limestone patio, usually just in front of the substantial wooden barn doors and we would often start playing the music they provided, usually the wedding march, from the adjacent barn as their procession began, allowing me full access to their most stirring marriage ceremonies. It was heaven on earth for me and I reveled in it.

Each morning I’d pick and arrange all the fresh flowers for the inside dining rooms. It became my favorite ritual. I could have been a florist in another life. I became quite handy at putting disparate bits of shrubbery together dramatically into a cohesive arrangement. Then I’d feed the cow behind the barn and work my way through the strange menagerie I’d collected during this most pastoral phase of my life. John had constructed several offbeat fowl houses from bits and pieces he’d found on the property, and while feeding the growing flock of about thirty chickens I might discover a few freshly laid brown or light-blue eggs in the nesting boxes he’d hidden away so cunningly. Then