jmgoyder

I had felt it before fleetingly – that ‘in love’ sensation – but never like this; this was unfamiliar.

Every morning I would arrive on my bicycle by 8am and Inna would already be making the toast and poached eggs for Husband and the two farm workers. I would set the two tables; the table in the kitchen was where the two farm workers ate and Husband, Inna and I would eat in the adjacent dining room. I was fascinated by the rules and rituals. For example, the farm workers would be served Weeties first, but Husband and his mother always ate Cornflakes. The farmworkers used the green plates and stainless steel cutlery whereas we used the white plates and silver cutlery.

Once everything was ready, Inna would wait for everyone to arrive and her anticipation was contagious. It’s hard to believe now that 8.30am represented such an exciting occasion for us but it did; the breakfast ritual held a lot of meaning. And for me, the moment when the men arrived at the back door and Husband, with his booming, laughing voice, entered the kitchen, became the best moment of the day. He would grin and say, “Jules!” as if he were surprised to see me, then he would go and have a wash while I served the farmhands and gave Inna her eggs. Then, he’d emerge from the bathroom and take his place at the dining room table and I would serve him too.

Breakfast was quite a busy routine so I would be up and down from my seat in the dining room constantly, replacing the men’s cereal bowls with their eggs and then making toast for their third course and then doing the coffee and tea thing. To begin with I simply followed Inna while she did these things but eventually I got used to how it all worked and she was able to relax and chat to Husband in the dining room.

I absolutely loved each moment because it was so utterly new to me. Inna was extremely stern to begin with and reprimanded me quite a bit but I didn’t mind because I found her fascinating and I would have walked on hot coals for Husband. Occasionally, he would wink at me from across the other side of the dining room table and I would just about die of joy.

After six months, I became part of the furniture of their lives and Husband had well and truly insinuated himself into the most private part of my heart. I didn’t tell anybody because I wanted to be in love all by myself.

Hahaha! Tricked you!

Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself!

There will be no reference to sex at all in this love story.

I will now write a proper chapter!

… was six years in the making.

Yes, believe it or not, the first kiss happened six years after I first met Husband. I was 23 before he would come anywhere near me!

It was worth the wait.

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!

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?”

Once upon a time I was a teenager

I thought I was supposed to go to university so I did and I boarded with a funny old woman in Perth whose teacups stank of stale tea

My subjects were: Anthropology, Ancient Greek, English and something else – I’ve forgotten

Dad came up one weekend and bought two large pizzas and we sat on the university lawn and ate the lot

After 6 months I quit university because I was homesick for my family and the countryside

I got my first job – looking after an elderly woman who had recently broken her hip and needed help cooking for her farm workers

She was very scary because she was so stern

The farm worker who opened the front door on my first day was also scary and abrupt

Two floppy-eared tiny dogs yapped at me

The elderly woman showed me what to do and I did it very willingly (and inadequately), but, even though she frightened me, I adored her from day 1

The farm worker turned out to be her son which surprised me because he seemed like a bit of a yob

My dad and mum were glad to have me home again

I rode my bicycle to work – it was a 30 kms round trip, morning and afternoon

I fell in love with the elderly woman’s family

I fell in love with her son but it took him a decade to propose because of the 23-year age gap

My husband