The raindrops trickle down the large window of the converted barn I call home – perched on a meadow that overlooks Oxford’s Dreaming Spires. I stare out at Matthew Arnold’s Signal Elm in the distance and imagine The Scholar Gipsy roaming the countryside in front of me some 400 years earlier. It’s a different land to the one I recently inhabited.
Were you a dream, Tasmania? Did I inhabit your shores while the children sprouted out of their infancy? Did I visit your wineries and scale your mountains?
I wouldn’t believe it now, except the framed photo hanging on the wall of us at Seven Mile Beach exposes the evidence.
It’s been six months since I said goodbye to you, Tasmania.
The pandemic turned our world upside down. Literally. While the Apple Isle was the safest place in the world to be, I had to govern my fear of catching the virus, or live with a greater fear – losing my mother. The threat inching its way to the front doors of households across the world catapulted my serene spirit out of its paradisial apathy. This thing that might snatch a family member from our lives incited me to book a one-way flight home. The decision was made to let our son finish his year at The Hutchins School, while my husband organised the sale of our house; our beautiful house overlooking the Derwent in all its splendour, in all its moods.
The atmosphere at Brisbane transit lounge was grim. It was a ghost town. The occasional masked passenger projected a cocktail of uneasy energy our way. Faith was all I had to lean on as I stepped onto the empty aircraft destined for England.
Strangers asked what on earth I was doing with two young girls bound for a country plagued with the virus. I wasn’t sure what to say. We were leaving an idyllic life on the shores of Sandy Bay, to be side by side with family at the most desperate time in my living memory. In order to secure our daughter’s place at her new secondary school, we had to pack a decade’s worth of belongings in a matter of weeks. Should I tell these strangers that it also meant leaving my husband and son behind?
Soon after we arrived, case numbers skyrocketed, and my country was in lockdown.
Soon after we arrived, my sister fell ill. I couldn’t help her because I was told to self-isolate. She went into decline after a week of symptoms and the doctor feared that the virus had taken hold of her respiratory system. All I could do was pace the room, always meeting the same four walls. All I could do was plead with God to spare her.
My prayers were answered and after weeks of fighting off this filthy flu she slowly improved. My protectiveness of my mother grew fiercer thereafter. If the virus could do that to my fit and healthy sister, what would it do to mum? Not on my watch. Christmas was cancelled; life was cancelled until further notice. I would order food online and disinfect it all before dropping it off on her doorstep. If the postman got too close, I growled.
There were moments where I wished I could magic us back to Sandy Bay. There were moments where I didn’t think I’d get through it. Thousands of miles away, my husband and son were enjoying their last chances of Tasmanian sun – bushwalking in Freycinet, mountain biking in St Helens – while I kept the desperation of the situation to myself. When it was time for him to travel, Australia denied him permission to leave the country. When would the sweet smell of spring replace the harsh frost of winter?
Hope came in the shape of early blossoms pushing through the morning dew. The Oxford vaccination program was working and at last I took mum to get her jab. We got home and immediately opened a bottle of champagne. Jansz would have been welcome. Jubilation permeated every inch of the house.
Most of my relations have now been vaccinated and the countryside is bursting with the colours and energy of spring. Britain is opening up again and people have never been friendlier. My boys were eventually allowed to catch a flight. Our reunion at the airport was emotional. I ran into their arms promising to myself that I would never allow us to be separated again.
At the start of World War II, my father and his uncle were seized from their parents and sent to the States, for fear that Britain would fall into the hands of Hitler. They left as children and returned as young men, years later. If this had been the longest three months of my life, I can’t begin to imagine what five years would have done to our family. The tears kept coming.
Thank you, Oxford. Summer is finally on its way.
Thank you, Tasmania, for the treasure trove of happy memories.
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.
