jmgoyder

When Husband first answered the door that fateful day, I knew he would be Husband, but I will never know how I knew – I just did.

Even when I thought he was a yob, the local cowboy, Inna’s overseer – dressed in his black t-shirt, football shorts – and still not realizing until later on that first day that he was her son, I would have married him on the spot.

Poor Husband! He, of course, had no idea he had made this kind of impression on a girl my age and, in fact, he didn’t actually ‘get it’ for another year or so.

But Inna ‘got it’ straight away and, once she and I had established a rapport she would often accuse me of having a “cuddle” with her son if I didn’t answer her bell soon enough (yes, she had a brass bell!)

I was terrified of Husband back then – terrified of his sternness and terrified he would somehow find out that I adored him!

The family used to have their 5pm drinks in the back veranda (you know, the same one I’ve mentioned before in other posts about wings and things)! I would be able to see them through the kitchen window because the kitchen was adjacent. So, if you can picture it, I would be in the kitchen in my hippy clothes, trying unsuccessfully to make whatever meal Inna had instructed me to and she and her two sons – Husband, who looked after her, and his brother who lived across the road with his wife and four kids – and sometimes other visitors, either elderly neighbours or Husband’s rather rambunctious mates, would be drinking and eating nibblies. It was definitely ‘the place to be’ and even though there was always a plentiful supply of alcohol, and nobody got drunk, as a rather naive teenager from a teetotalling family with fundamentalist Christian beliefs, I was (before the word was invented) utterly GOBSMACKED!

I would watch them out of the corner of my eye, through the lens of the kitchen window, and my own upbringing, whilst simultaneously trying to create white sauce out the of the glue I’d created, and I would panic!

Usually the term ‘culture shock’ is used to describe situations in which people from completely different countries are thrust together but there is no way of getting past (in retrospect) that I was extremely culture shocked and had nothing in my upbringing to measure this family against. I had lived in Canada and Papua New Guinnea and had met and been friends with numerous people from different races and yet this family presented me with something so out of my orbit that every day was a new shock.

But perhaps, when I think back, it was the shock of falling in love that most affected me. I’d had various crushes on boys and some innocent relationships but, when Husband opened the front door on that first day of my first job and said, gruffly, “It’s a farm – use the back door from now on”, then yelled to the scary elderly woman that “the girl” had arrived, my heart did a triple jump and that was it. I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that he would be my husband. I didn’t know then, of course, that it would take another decade or so for him to realize the same thing!