Last Tango in Toulouse (2 page)

This desire to live every moment of life to the full is no doubt deeply connected to the hormonal changes that most women experience in mid-life. It must be very disturbing for those who have delayed having babies until their late thirties to confront this urgent restlessness when they still have school lunches to pack and Saturday morning sports to attend. At least I was in the fortunate position, with my children fully grown and completely independent, to be able to indulge myself in the desire for freedom that was overwhelming me.

During the blissfully irresponsible period I spent in France, I enjoyed, for the first time ever, a breathing space that allowed me time to think about and reflect upon my life to date. It was quite cathartic looking back to my childhood and the difficulties of my family life with parents who were brilliantly clever but deeply flawed – alcoholic, left-wing political rebels who tried to live within the 1950s ultra-conservative social culture. It was also humbling to look back at my years as a parent and to realise that, despite the best of intentions, I had also made so many blunders, in many ways not dissimilar to those made by my own parents. Most painfully, it was illuminating to look back on my marriage, which I had always regarded as solid as a rock and admit that in my heart there were many areas of difficulty and frustration. No different, I have no doubt, from many long-term relationships, yet confronting for me now to consider so deeply.

During this period of reflection I also started to look ahead to what I wanted for the remainder of my life, for the next twenty or thirty years. Should I go on as I had always done, clinging to the stability of my large, extended family of children and in-laws and grandchildren, which had always seemed at the heart of my very existence? Or should I make radical changes that could have disastrous consequences for my family life?

Returning home after my liberating time in France, I immediately threw myself back into the all-too-familiar pressures of work and family life. I had urgent deadlines for magazine articles and botanical photographs to supply to publishers and, with Christmas imminent, I was faced with a mad scramble of preparations – the pine tree to decorate, food shopping for the eighteen or so people who would participate in our usual celebratory lunch and, of course, last-minute presents and treats to buy for grandchildren.

Still jet-lagged, and also keenly culture-lagged after such a long time immersed in rural French life, I raced around getting organised and trying desperately to fit back into my ‘real' life. I experienced a few hair-raising moments readjusting to driving on the left-hand side of the road, the same problems in reverse as when I first learnt to drive in France the previous June. After being away so long I realised I was looking at my old, familiar surroundings with a fresh eye, an eye that had adjusted to the simplicity of small French villages and open green fields.
Although we tend to believe that Australia is relatively under-populated, I found coming home exactly the opposite. Where I had been living in France was so tranquil and uncluttered compared with the upper Blue Mountains where we had been living and working for twenty-five years. The school holiday throng of tourists, the lack of parking and the general down-at-heel appearance of so many streetscapes grated on my new-found sensibilities.

The day before Christmas I had what I can only describe as an epiphany on Katoomba Street. Caught up in yet another irritating traffic jam on this steeply sloping stretch of road that leads tourists to the famous Three Sisters Lookout, I was overcome with an intense feeling of frustration. I simply didn't relate to this place any more. I didn't like it and I didn't want to be here. I don't know exactly
where
I wanted to be, but it wasn't in Katoomba or even in our pretty village of Leura, which had changed so drastically in character over the last decade.

When we first moved to the Blue Mountains in the late 1970s, Leura was a quiet backwater. There was one small teashop in the main street and many of the other shops were either vacant or stocked with half-empty shelves. On Sunday morning you could have easily fired a cannon down the main street of Leura Mall without the risk of hitting anybody. Then the mountains enjoyed a tourism renaissance, becoming as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s, a popular weekend and holiday destination. Guest-houses and B&Bs started hanging out welcome signs all over the Upper Mountains, and more than half the shops in the main street were converted into trendy cafes or bistros. While the influx of tourists did wonders for the prosperity of local business life and therefore the economy, there had been a definite
downside for local residents. Over the past few years parking in the village had become impossible, even after an entire back-block of houses was cleared to create an extensive new car parking area. Up to a dozen huge tour buses would park in a side street every day, disgorging hundreds of sightseers wanting to cruise the shops or stop for a coffee. As a result, shopping locally became very expensive, with most retail outlets charging tourist prices, forcing residents to travel further afield to the supermarkets instead of patronising the local corner store (which, in turn, was eventually converted into yet another stylish cafe!). Certainly the village centre looked charming because of the money spent on tarting up shop facades and maintaining the pretty gardens that line the footpath and the central strip. But it was no longer possible to stop quickly to pick up a loaf of bread or a newspaper without double parking and causing traffic chaos, then running the gauntlet of the crowds walking four deep down the footpath.

The day before Christmas I announced to my amazed husband that I wanted to sell up and move out. He had only just recovered from the shock of my desire to buy a house in a foreign country and now it seemed I was hell-bent on dragging him away from a house and garden that he adored, nestled in a community where he felt absolutely at home.

Generally men are less thrilled at the prospect of change than women. David, in particular, is a man who hates even the slightest disruption to his set pattern of life. The simple act of rearranging the living room furniture can send him into a steep decline, so my new idea of abandoning the house in which we had reared our children and the garden that I had slaved in (not to mention spent a fortune on) for more than two decades
brought him totally undone. He was convinced that I had lost the plot, and put up strong objections to my idea.

‘I thought we would stay here forever,' he lamented. ‘I was planning to die here.'

With a wry but determined smile I told him it could ‘possibly be arranged'.

He began to realise that I was deadly serious.

The essence of my argument for selling up and moving was the dawning realisation that our way of life in the mountains had been destroyed by development and tourism, and that we needed to look for a quieter place – perhaps even the farm that I had always dreamt about.

For me the final straw was the ugly and invasive red trolley tour bus. Phoney San Francisco-style dark red buses take tourists on whistlestop tours to all the main beauty spots and attractions in Leura and Katoomba. For almost a year I had been aware of them buzzing down our street eight times a day, but what I didn't realise was that our house and garden was actually part of the tour. How many mornings did I wander out in my slippers to deposit the recycling bin on the footpath only to be confronted by a bus loaded with wide-eyed tourists gazing in our direction? A friend, recently moved to the district, decided to take the tour out of interest, and immediately phoned me to report in malicious delight.

‘They come down your street and the guide tells them, “Look to your right and see the house and garden of the television lifestyle presenter and garden writer, Mary Moody”,' he said.

The irony is that most of the tourists are foreign, generally Asian, and obviously wouldn't have the vaguest idea about local television programs or personalities. While I laughed heartily at
the notion of being part of the local equivalent of those tacky Hollywood celebrity tours, I also felt a strong sense of being invaded. It sharpened my resolve that leaving our home in the mountains was the only option open to us.

Meanwhile, I urgently needed to turn my mind to the task of finishing
Au Revoir
, the book I had started writing about my adventures the previous year in France. One of the basic guidelines drummed into me as a young reporter back in the 1960s was that ‘good journalists' never put themselves forward, never project their own personality or viewpoint into the interview or article. I had spent most of my journalistic career either interviewing newsworthy people or researching factual topics for magazine articles or television segments, so finding myself suddenly writing about my own life was quite a challenge. During the last twenty-five years working as an editor or author of gardening books I have, from time to time, injected a little of my own philosophy and personality into the business of being a gardener. Yet I have tended to maintain those old-fashioned journalistic rules about being an observer rather than a participant. Besides, writing columns and books aimed at helping people grow better cabbages hardly allows the writer to include a lot of personal information.

However,
Au Revoir
demanded something quite different of me, and I had to completely rethink the boundaries of the writing style I had adhered to for so many decades. My first thought was that I should write a sort of middle-aged woman's travelogue/adventure story with lots of detail about the local food and customs in rural France. It didn't turn out that way.

Initially, while gallivanting around the French countryside, eating and drinking myself into oblivion, I didn't even consider putting pen to paper. After all, sitting down to write every day for hours in order to meet a deadline was exactly the sort of pressure I was escaping from. I had a loose agreement with the publishers that I might or might not describe my personal and physical progress during this odyssey, but under no circumstances was I going to allow it to cramp my style. After several months of self-indulgence I finally realised that I could, without feeling too constrained, document some of my impressions of the region of France to which I had made my escape.

At the forefront of my mind was the conversation I had had back in Sydney with my agent and my publisher before I left home, discussing the style of the book and the voice that would relate the story. They both felt it was not enough simply to start at the beginning of the actual journey to France, where I set off in search of some personal space and freedom. They believed that I needed to elaborate on some aspects of my earlier life that would help to explain why I felt so compelled to take time out. They were convinced that I had to paint a fuller picture in order to justify my sudden flight from home, family and responsibility. But the thought of describing the personal details of my life felt totally bizarre. I didn't know where to start and was convinced, quite cynically, that nobody would be all that interested anyway.
Most journalists have an inbuilt suspicion of ‘autobiography' – weighty books written by those who happen to be in public life and believe themselves to be significant enough in the scheme of things to set out the fine detail of their lives for all to appreciate and admire; or by sporting heroes who, apart from scoring a few triumphant goals, haven't even really lived a life. The thought of this style of book sent a shiver of revulsion down my spine and almost caused me not to start writing at all.

My next obstacle was deciding which voice to write in. It is very difficult to write in the first person when you have been trained to avoid using the words ‘I' and ‘me' in your work. Feeling a sense of panic and a total lack of confidence in setting down even the first sentence, I phoned my agent at her Sydney office.

‘Who is supposed to be telling this story?' I asked. ‘What is the tense – past, present or future? I don't know where to begin.'

She advised me to start at the beginning: to write about my childhood and take it from there.