Grief is tough on everyone. It doesn’t discriminate, nor does it judge. It transcends age, religion and financial status. Grief doesn’t care for you or your bargaining tools, and when it wants to knock you down, it will wind you with gusto.

It happened to me the other day. After 45 years of living in the same village on the outskirts of Oxford, my mother tentatively opened the door of our family home and allowed a mob of strong men to bundle her belongings into a large removal van. Within a day, our childhood was boxed up and removed from the location that witnessed the final reunion as a family before my father died.       

It wasn’t turning the ignition key on the driveway for the last time that reduced me to tears; it was giving away my father’s books. His library was the room he loved the most and each book represented a part of who he was. Every paperback opened a door to one of the neural pathways of his existence; explanations for deeds misunderstood, regrets for the young boy who was evacuated in a war and who spent five years as an orphan; passion for an art he wished he had mastered; love for the natural world; elaborations on a subject effortlessly conquered; and depictions of the many interests he managed to pursue throughout his life.

Clearing the shelves left me emotionally drained, especially when a tough decision on the fate of a book had to be made. One book suddenly stood out. I tugged its spine, the large hardback rocked back into the palm of my hand and out of its snug slot. I peered at the title and gasped – Tasmania The Beautiful Island, by Jennifer Pringle-Jones.

We certainly never gifted this book to him – he left us long before we even moved to Tasmania! Staring at the photo of Port Arthur church on the front cover, I tried to understand the meaning of what I had just unearthed. When a book was in his library, it had a purpose and was usually the target of his curiosity and resolve. Had Tasmania been a place he had always longed to visit? Acceptance that this question would be left unanswered evermore was key. Grief was steadily making a reappearance.

I thought back to the number of times I spent with a cup of tea in my Sandy Bay kitchen, watching the world go by – typically in a cruise ship ready to sample local treats. How many times had I wished the old man had beaten that ghastly disease and joined our mother on her many trips to visit the grandchildren on the other side of the world. How I wished I could have shared a morsel of my Tasmanian life with him. What fun we would have had, exploring the sights from this book. It felt so cruel.          

I put the book down, dried my eyes and stacked it on the pile that would be returning with me to our new home in Goring-on-Thames. It would start a new life with us and act as a prompt for the British-Australian generation, who had spent their childhood climbing kunyani and playing on the beaches below, to return one day and reminisce of the happy days spent under the golden sun of that Beautiful Island.

Clarissa Horwood grew up in Oxford, courtesy of her English father, and spent all her childhood holidays with relatives in France, courtesy of her French mother. She has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and can swear better in Spanish than either English or French. Despite being so thoroughly European, she married an Australian and moved to Hobart in 2013. Their three children are adept at switching accents. The family returned to Oxford in 2020 to be with Clarissa’s mother during Covid-19, and the move was such a major upheaval that it looks likely to be permanent. Her column, Letter from Oxford, will be about memories and connections between two cities a world apart, but it will be written in a Tasmanian accent.