1858: under what she thought

Wagnerian doom, the curse of wandering,

she was, at forty-six, prepared

to brave another change:

Twamley (with several more to come)

the latest humiliating move, the sixth

in fifteen years —miles back from the road

along a grinding track — she christened with

her Brummy maiden name, as I suspect,

to make a point about control, as if

sympathetic magic might

just stabilise their lives.

Cambria and Riversdale, alas,

each with their pretty gardens, now

hopelessly gone, the inheritance lost

with three out of her four boys

(sixteen, twelve, and nine) alive

(one a sickly child), both husband

(whose single asset was

a silver tongue) and wife at loggerheads.

1995: we dusted up the track on Prosser's Plains

to find the house. Two yapping dogs

ran figures-of-eight around the car. Ayoung

woman fetched a grandad-gnome from hoeing

the vegetable patch to tell us how

a bolting horse had crippled him and how

at eighty-six he took his time and would not

pose for photographs. Had it not been

for eucalypts you'd have sworn it was an English Spring

along the Downs, so green the undulating fields.

Here in a rain forest at the back of beyond

Louisa Anne sent Charles to work at politics,

and here they told us things not found in print,

Charles's love of rum and of the sealing wax

(still there) she'd used to fix

spidery filaments across the cellar door.