From Griffith Review 19; Re-imagining Australia; ed. Julianne Schultz

When I looked at my father, I imagined Australia. In those first memories he is a tall figure in a dark blue uniform: handsome, glamorous and exciting, rather like a movie star father might seem today in the eyes of a four-year-old. As well as energy, he radiates a potent sense of freedom. Freedom as in wide-open spaces and boundlessness.

My Australian father, Brian, was a pilot in the RAF. He had been a World War II ace, a member of the elite Pathfinder squadrons who flew thrillingly low over enemy territory to identify targets and drop marker flares for the laden bombers lumbering up behind. Of all dangerous flying missions, this was surely among the most perilous. Only a handful of those in the first hundred returned. My father was one of those who made it back. He survived the war and remained in the RAF for the next fifteen years: he loved flying jets.

Many children who went through Mr Gordon’s school might remember him with a shudder of distaste. He was an intimidating man. Autocratic, domineering, subject to volcanic eruptions of rage in which he would hurl pieces of chalk at the head of any child, boy or girl, who had  driven him mad by – he never hesitated to name it – their stupidity. And not only name it but yell it like a thunderclap. It was the 1950s, and his aim was true. The children were terrified of him.

At the age of eleven I dimly recognised, although I could not have given it any name, a tortured soul. I was aware, in a childish, confused way, that Mr Gordon was deeply and profoundly unhappy. It was clear that he was an intellectually driven man, humiliated by his modest position as headmaster of a small, isolated village school in a Lincolnshire backwater. It was also obvious that he disliked or detested most children. Their rowdy messiness, triviality, laziness and vulgarity, their very immaturity encountered on a daily basis, kept him in a state of near-constant fury and frustration. He was a man whose civilized values collided head-on with his baser instincts, and fought a losing battle for supremacy.

Article in The Spectator Australia, Christmas Issue 20/27 Dec 2008

The single storey, ancient stone farmhouse is surrounded by rolling fields, several miles from the nearest town. It is long, narrow, charming, with more lamps than I have ever seen in one small house. The sleeping quarters are at one end: two bedrooms, and a third double bed in the sitting room. I must walk through Anne’s bedroom and past Caroline’s bed to the kitchen to reach the bathroom. But we are old friends, and this is the third successive year that the three of us have gathered in a wintry landscape to write.

We are in the heart of rural France. South-west of Paris, only ninety minutes away by train, it might as well be a far-flung province.  The region is called le Perche; tourists come rarely and certainly not off season. When de Gaulle spoke of La France Profonde – provincial, quiet, inward-looking – he might have been describing le Perche, with its sleepy capital Nogent-le-Rotrou, our nearest, internet cafe-free, small town.