Deborah Forster

As always, the idea seemed okay. Alan had two weeks off, one to write and one to relax. I’m working on another book, part of which concerns an Italian. Alan joined the dots and said, ‘Why don’t we go to Italy for a week? ‘
I find travelling less fun than most people so I’m the donkey being coaxed with a carrot. Anyway, we are going and it will be fun.
Then came the problem of passports. Mine had expired by two weeks and Alan had lost his somewhere within the crevices of the house. Great. We mounted a hectic search. That night was like the kids’ book, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ when Max made mischief of one kind and another. In all our charging around, the baby gate on the stairs got pushed and sprang off and imbedded itself in the wall and left a decent gouge.
Meanwhile I looked through every box we have, casting aside old columns and pictures of babies now grown into adults with kids of their own. Where the birth certificates were, we had no idea, but it turned out they weren’t hard to replace. It was only a two-day job. The passports were more challenging. At the Auspost in the city we discovered mistakes were made in places where no mistakes could be allowed. The brilliant Anne, with her long hair and glasses at the passport counter was an expert and a fusspot which I think you have to be. We will get the documents soon.
Passports come around every ten years and in those ten years we age and there it all is laid out in the little photos on the desk before us. It’s a shock to see what the years are doing while we think we’re in charge. I now look like someone else. Alan looks all right, but his hair is white. How did that happen? Even our black Labrador is fully grey on her face and her feet. She was a little sack of black velvet not long ago.
Picking up the passports, a thin man just passing by, told us where to go, it was up two flights. He smelled of cigarettes and bitterness. He lives in Bali and had come back to get a new passport because his wife was being unhelpful. ‘Wants a bullet that one,’ he said. The beautiful wooden walls seemed to be closing in on me. Who says such a thing? Then he said he was cold and he certainly was cold.

It’s strange that we’re going to Italy when I really wanted to go to Greece. When we got married we were working on a newspaper in the south of England, ‘The Exeter Express and Echo’. We decided to move on and bought a couple of bikes and took them over to Europe, camping on our way. It was all lovely but when we got to Greece, it felt like home. I should have made my character Greek, and then we could have retraced some steps around the Greek islands, ah but I was younger then and sat on the deck of the broad ferry putting my bike back together and watching the approach of land, the sea choppy and blue. And now much of the islands have been burned.
If you could freeze a moment and have it to return to, Greece would be mine. The gravel under the bike tyres, the hot sky, the breezes lapping at you, the little restaurant with fresh taromasalata and warm bread every evening. The sea glinting. Washing clothes in a plastic bucket beside a wall of red geraniums. Squashing giant mozzies on the whitewashed wall and then washing the blood off and debating whose blood it was. One day I crashed coming down a hill and limped home with the bike. I had gravel rash from head to toe. I found a puppy on the island and loved him and fed him each day, wanted to bring him home. Not possible. We waited for a month on the island for Alan’s parents to send some money for the fare home. In those days, life seemed to come upon us in waves of challenges. Each wave posing tests of our strength, something new every time. Usually, we kept going and time with came with us and we prevailed. We didn’t always win though, there were stumbles.
We arrived in Melbourne with 47 drachmas, worth exactly one dollar, and lived in the front upstairs room of mum’s shop in West Footscray. We both had jobs at The Age and that saved us, still we were poor for some time. We moved to Curzon Street, the noisiest street in North Melbourne, to the smallest house. Our life began again with two kittens, named Hazel and Plum.