TRAVELS WITH MY GRANDDAUGHTER

Today when you invite your granddaughter to accompany you on a grand tour of Europe and its cultural history or in this instance three weeks in London, you do not start the journey by sea calling into the great duty-free ports of Asia, Singapore, Aden, Cairo, you fly over them. In the days of my grandmother, I was enthralled by her descriptions of those magical places and their bazaars and the bargaining dictated by local tradition. Later, I was to follow in some of her footsteps through these exotic places but now, with Estella in our Qantas Dreamliner, we were flying over them.

I watched the names unfold on the map as we flew through the night from Darwin first crossing the Timor Sea to Dili over Ambon, Surabaya, Makassar, Da Nang, Sandakan, Hanoi, Kunming, Qaraghandy, Orenburg, Ufa, Jayapura, Kupang, Tula, Kota Kinabalu…

Their names evoke a mystery of lands not visited but known when I lived in the Far East. I look to share some of this with the grandchild across the aisle but she is curled up like a kitten sound asleep, her long black lashes create crescents high up across her cheeks finishing in a black face mask; soon they will disappear when she adds a black eye mask and I see a huddled figure with only a nose showing and have to smile at the sleep of youth. But by then I am back in the Far East seeing a girl not much older than Estella’s twenty years and just as naive about the world she finds herself in, carrying this innocence, soaking up the charged atmosphere while believing I was a part of the scene, confusing the European and Asian women who met me on what I was doing there. 

A blonde girl in a mini skirt in Manila, catching broken-down old cabs decorated with the Virgin Mary and plastic good luck charms was strange enough but I appeared eager to learn the ways of these older women and advice came thick and fast.

Then, innocence protected me until Africa, but that was not yet. There was a war going on in Vietnam, Da Nang and Hanoi, and terrorists in Mindanao and it all interested me. I majored in economics and politics at Sydney University in the 1960s and enthusiastically studied French colonial occupation of Vietnam and the bloody ending of the first Indochina War of Independence at the Fort at Dien Bien Phu. It would be later in my life I began buying ceramics from these areas, Chinese and Vietnamese, collected in the bazaars by French colonists and brought back to Paris at the end of the French colonial empire. My dealer Madame Verneux at 90 rue du Bac in Paris became a dear friend and every time I carried a piece back to Australia I carried a memory of my time in the East. When my daughter, Adelicia was marrying I bought a fantastic ceramic majolica two-foot-high urn from a 19th-century Vietnamese kiln which must have come home with one of these expatriates to be bought by me, an Australian woman, and shipped back to the East intact in all its beauty of dragons and scrolling lotus. 

Singapore was caught up in the big business of the Vietnam War with soldiers on Rest and Recreation and civilians passing through bringing tales of massive amounts of equipment and money pouring in from the West, mainly the USA. It was then I slowly became aware of this new world of mah jong and eccentric expatriates and a nearby war attracting the scoundrels of the world where money was to be made in corruption and killing. It didn’t come near me but I saw hints of it and heard a distant cousin in the Australian embassy was found dead in Saigon....he had been engaged to a general’s daughter and rumor abounded. (Has nothing changed with the fall of Afghanistan and mountains of wasted American hardware left behind to be sold by criminals for bloody gain?)

The East in its beauty and savagery will be forever an attraction if only from 33,000 feet above. Ambon will also come into my life when forty years later I sit on the Council of the National Gallery of Australia where one of our most precious possessions is the prehistoric Ambon Stone. It is small but exceedingly rare and cannot travel in its rarity, being our responsibility to protect it as caretakers.

As my grandchild slept on, her face now hidden, an ineffable sweetness swept over me and a desire to protect; but all was well in the here and now and we were going to London and we could leave behind that young woman in the East with her dreams and hopes and regrets……. it was now time for another.

We now move on to Estella and how she arrived in our lives over twenty years ago. There was not a lot of joy in the family when her father announced a baby was on the way. My husband, Bun had been killed in his Formula One Lotus just seven months earlier and the children and I were in shock. But a baby? How could one deny the gift of a new life? Young Adelicia wailed she wasn’t ready to be an aunty but (as I later confided in the children) I felt like an old wooden jetty being buffeted by the waves, this was just one more unexpected wave I could shudder and absorb.

If Estella’s beginning was a surprise her arrival was no less momentous. While she was busy being born her grandmother, me, was hosting the Prime Minister of Australia to a dinner in our family home. As John Howard stepped through the entrance I was able to announce Estella had arrived 20 minutes earlier. Luckily I had found a card upstairs in my study and he inscribed a welcome message to her.

Not only were momentous moments flying through the ether that night but the dinner took place ten days after 9/11 when the Prime Minister had been in Washington at the time and I had just returned from London. That evening John and Jeanette talked of their experiences in the most candid and extraordinary way. Meanwhile, Estella’s mother Kim, was recovering from a difficult birth, and the baby had a very painful left arm, which doctors thought may have been dislocated.

Estella still has that card and met John Howard in my home at a Christmas party when she was fifteen….such is the wheel of life that turns.

If we move on in years Estella went with her little sister, Nadia to live in Hobart, leaving my heart behind, but beforehand she carved her name into the English dolls' house in my playroom just in case any other grandchildren should appear and lay claim to it! She also souvenired a tiny unique Cinderella book. I did not know about Cinderella until our London trip.

So here was I at 33,000 feet and 10,000 kilometers from our destination with a grandchild I knew but did not know; London was to renew acquaintance for us both.

What would I show her and where would we start?

New Bond Street, Sloan Street, Piccadilly....and how were we going to fit all this in with the world of London theatre? There was no way, this was just a taste and I wanted to make it perfect. It wasn’t about me it was about her and learning to gauge her energy and her interest. I found out early not to push her when I tried to buy her a black jacket in Harrods just so she would have a first purchase. Looking at me across my encouraging words...she did look divine in it.......and with big blue wan eyes said, “What do you want me to say DD?” It was like a thunderbolt and I drew back immediately, she was with me but not. Her father had said to treat her carefully as she would be shocked at the prices of everything, including a sandwich. Yet here was I throwing a designer jacket over her shoulders and receiving such a reply. It was my first lesson.......do not take the child too fast and don’t overwhelm her with treats, we needed to find a place where we could communicate and share, comfortably. 

She showed an interest in visiting Harvey Nichols, Notting Hill, and Boots so they went onto the list. My original reason for the trip was to attend a special lunch at Parham House where Estella had been included. She said she doesn’t have castle clothes which I supposed you wouldn’t if your suitcases were two duffle bags with Uni clothes and a white cheesecloth dress from Hamilton Island. I assured her we would visit Harvey Nichols and Harrods for that castle outfit. In the end, it wasn’t the expensive black jacket in Harrods or the two bulky jumpers in Harvey Nichols and a bag of Charlotte Tilbury cosmetics but a fleeting visit to Christian Dior to see my friend Faz whom I had known for twenty years. On hearing about a castle Faz brought out the latest CD collections which happened to be modelled on the French schoolgirl look of black and white. Estella was rapidly dressed in a black mini skirt, a white short-sleeved blouse, and a loose black jacket. She balked at the black boots and asked if she could escape out to Sloan Street for a breath of fresh air. I knew then we were overdue for a meal, thanked Faz, paid for the clothes, and left. Harrods is just a very short hop from Sloan Street if you go the Hans Place way and we were soon in the Food Hall sitting up at the Sushi counter ordering a delicious meal. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and as I have always believed, an army marches on its stomach.

In the past when my children were small and jet-lagged, waking at 2 am beating each other with pillows, I would get up and make them scrambled eggs on toast or order room service and soon everyone would be back asleep. I also had to take into account the strangeness of a world she had last visited as a nine-month-old baby. As Estella said, “I thought Melbourne was big when I moved from Hobart, but London......”

On Monday we traveled by train to Pulborough.

Estella was of immense help here as she engaged with the ticket machine and we were soon in possession of two return tickets. Greeted by our hosts, Lady Emma and David Barnard, and a generous morning tea in a cavernous kitchen we were soon being conducted through their home, Parham House. A perfect example of Elizabethan and Stuart architecture crammed with suits of armor and oil portraits on oak, wainscoting, and polished floors Estella wandered through the rooms in wonderment wearing her new black CD mini leather skirt with its ‘castle’ look. As she stood gazing transfixed at an enormous painting of James, Prince of Wales (the heir to Charles First, and died prematurely) in opulent royal regalia and mounted on a white horse near a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth First, I was struck with the realization she was in her first castle.

Estella amused her hostess with a remark that her visit to the lavatory reminded her of Tywon Lannister in Game of Thrones....... any minute she expected Tyrion to appear at the door and shoot her with a bow and arrow!

Our next visit to a castle is owned by my friends, Lord and Lady Fairhaven and we were invited to a family lunch on a glorious summery day.

It was casual but special as Lady F took Estella on a tour up the winding stairwell and bedrooms and onto the ramparts of the medieval tower from which comes the name of their home, Kirtling Tower. After being transported to the fifteenth century Estella was brought back to the twentieth century for luncheon in an English country house with its cold collation of venison, which she refused in preference to the quiche! 

As my friends and I caught up after the years of separation and lockdown, I saw Estella’s eyes drooping and suggested she go outside and walk through another English country joy, extensive herbaceous borders with their crowding of roses and annuals. For a short while, I caught sight of her white dress amongst splashes of color but she soon disappeared. Later, I walked outside and saw the white figure in the distance asleep on a lawn. My hosts were most amused that she had fallen asleep on the croquet lawn but pleased the watering machine was turned off!

Estella told me she saw a spider weaving a web on the lawn and lying down to watch, fell asleep. I decided there were more fairy stories weaving through this tale along with the spider’s web…….. medieval towers, weaving, sleeping princesses, than we could untangle and roared with laughter until she fell asleep again on the train going home!

After this, I felt she and I were beginning to reach the joy of being in tune on a holiday, pacing ourselves to the requirements of the day, sharing stories and impressions, and often going on our own way…….she to Wholefoods to buy fruit and her favorite watermelon cut up and to Dover Street Markets when they were on sale and I to Harrods for essentials and shoes.

We had one evening at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where I am a benefactor, for a private viewing of Raphael, which was the biggest treat I could have given my young art student. Added to the scholarship of being conducted by the curatorial director of the Exhibition, Estella was taken aside by the great Gabrielli Finaldi, the Director, to have him explain the Raphael cartoons to her. We then went off to dinner with old friends. Nothing was an anti-climax, it was more a matter of keeping up strength for all that London was offering. Both Estella and I were post-Covid with coughs, which gradually disappeared in the lovely heat of a European summer.

Our next exhibition was another privately conducted tour of the Walt Disney exhibition at the Wallace Collection. Small and jewell-like we engaged with images that had crowded both our childhoods. It was here Estella told me she had souvenired the little Cinderella book from the playroom all those years ago!

There were so many more exhibitions she wanted to see but time and energy constraints prevailed. We did manage to see Ralf Feinnes in “Straight Line Crazy” at the newish Tower Theatre beside Tower Bridge; again Estella booked online with my guidance on where it is best to sit. We stopped for a late supper at one of the perennial Ivy Restaurants next door and cabbed it home at midnight.

I haven’t mentioned our Jubilee celebrations, in which we engaged in a typical ‘Ashley way’………….asking my dear cabbie friend, Kevin, to drive us around London for a day to see all the bunting and great sights. He knew where streets were blocked off and we had the greatest time filming the flags, the monuments…….don’t drop my iPhone DD!…as I lean out of the cab to photograph Westminster Abbey as we drive past.

The last few days were a rush to buy suitcases and I dredged up one from a cupboard left years ago…very large, old-fashioned but with four wheels. Estella now had two suitcases and two duffle bags, but I saw the number of clothes in her room and offered to help until she closed the door on me. Another discovery of my granddaughter’s capabilities, like both my children, trained in carting a bag back and forth between house and farm, she is a good and efficient packer.

Kevin took Estella on her last shopping Saturday to Camden Markets and I was fascinated to see her dress in completely different clothes to those where she met my friends…….out came the black boots and her hair was adorably messy with all those tricky clips. She was away the whole day to be brought home by Kevin, the cab filled with bags of presents for her family and friends.

Our next stop was going to be Heathrow and the weighing machine!

Fortunately, there is no longer any VAT now that the UK is out of the EU and I am free of the hassles of long queues, frightful customs officers…..one who chased me when I filmed her refusing to return my VAT forms!………and poorer with no refunds but far more relaxed.

Back to the weighing machine and Estella had struck a hitch…she had to reduce a suitcase by seven kilos because she was transferring to a domestic flight in Sydney for Hobart. Lifting the cumbersome old suitcase from the weighing machine, Estella unzipped as two wheels fell off to be followed by their plastic infrastructure; the Qantas flight personnel decided five kilos only now be removed as 2 kilos could be binned!

When Estella arrived in Hobart her one new bag and two duffle bags appeared but not the old suitcase; when delivered to the farm by Qantas one day later it was discovered the handle had fallen off with all the tags attached and the suitcase was left with no easy identification.

And so our holiday ended and while I went through withdrawal symptoms, missing our bedroom chats as I tickled her feet, Estella became unwell in the cold and needed to have her appendices removed.

My next-in-line Grandaughter, Nadia turns eighteen this year which will give me two years to repair my finances before I then take her on the Grand Tour.