jmgoyder

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!

It took around three months for Husband’s mother to like me because I think she thought I was a bit of a hippy. At the time I dressed in a t-shirt and Indian skirt, and the thongs on my feet drew severe expressions of disapproval. After all, she was very ‘old school’ and was always dressed immaculately in a frock, cardigan, stockings, court shoes, and her face was always powdered, her lips lipsticked, whereas I would arrive every morning, all sweaty and dishevelled on my bicycle….

It was my grin that won her over. She finally stopped calling me ‘that girl’ and began calling me ‘darling’ and told me to stop calling her Mrs BG and, from that moment, I began to call her ‘Inna’, her family’s name for her. By this time I had already fallen in love with Husband but he didn’t know that – he just saw me as the new ‘help’ – ha!

It was an enormous learning curve for me to meet a family so different from my own; it wasn’t just the rural thing, it was the drinks at 5pm – gin and tonics, cinzano and lemonade, whiskey and soda, beer – and Inna’s Benson and Hedges cigarettes! For me it was like entering into a forbidden adventure since I had been brought up to think all of these things were rather sinful.

I watched and served and watched and served until one afternoon, after the milking of the cows was over, Husband came into the kitchen where I was trying to do the fish mornay and said, “Do you want to join us?”