My childhood backyard as seen by an artist

Denis Meagher's painting of my childhood backyard

The idea for this painting was a trompe l'oeile, that is, a painting designed to deceive the eye.  It would depict a window, and outside the window would be a view receding into the distance.

Denis Meagher, the artist, proposed to paint it for my kitchen door so that I could see it from the kitchen bench and feel I was looking out at a scene.

The subject of this trompe l'oeile was to be a view of the backyard from my mother's kitchen door.  I did not have a photo of the backyard - my parents and their house were long gone - so I had to describe it to Denis.  

So the brief for my trompe l'oeile was... a concrete path leading to the back fence.  My mother's garden of poppies.  Chooks. A few tough shrubs.  A lawn.  A clothes line.  Tiger the tabby cat.

That's when I discovered the yawning gap between the picture in my head and and the words that describe it.  I knew I could not convey what I remembered of that backyard, so we ended up with two separate mental images, mine and Denis'. 

We were talking about the same thing, but we only had words in common.  

As you can see, Denis took artistic licence with my backyard - and I loved it.  He signed it and dated it 1993, and it hangs on my wall today as one of my favourite paintings.  

So, it is my childhood backyard in name only.  Yes, he had all the ingredients: chooks, clothes line, Tiger, poppies...but not as I knew them.

The chooks were never allowed into the garden.  They had a dusty run down by the back fence, and as a little girl, I was terrified of them.  I never went near them.  

The clothes line was not a Hills Hoist, as depicted by Denis.  It was two lines strung between two poles.  The poles had a strut of wood at the top, giving them a T-shape, and the strut had a line on each end.  And there was a clothes prop to raise the lines when wet clothes weighed them down.

And then there were the poppies.

My mother was no gardener, and her garden yielded few poppies, and not the giddy profusion you see in Denis' painting. 

My pedal car.  Mum's flower garden in background. (apologies for quality of pic)

I had a pedal car, and I would ride it along the path and pick mum's flowers and present them to her.  She was less than delighted, and I do not remember if she ever planted poppies again.

Tiger our tabby.  The thongs belong to Denis.  He inhabited my painting.

As for the flowering shrubs in Denis' painting.  They too were fanciful.
My father tried hard to create a botanic wonderland, but the house was near the coast and the soil was little more than sand.  He struck gold with oleanders and once he knew he was on a good thing he stuck to it.  He repeated them around the garden so much that I learned to hate them.

In later years, I was not surprised to learn that their leaves were poisonous:  they had that sort of attitude.  In fact I was rather taken by a short story about a woman who chopped up oleander leaves and baked them in a cake for her husband.  He died.

Denis' painting also spares us the sight of the outdoor toilet, which was tucked out of sight behind the house.  It had a pan toilet and it was collected once a week by some brave soul who came early in the morning, hoping not to find any one in there.  They would carry away the full one, and leave an empty one behind.

It smelled bad.  To counteract that, a lattice wall overgrown with a thick green vine shielded the door.  Its flowers were orange honey suckles that tried to outperfume the toilet.  These flowers would ooze a thin honey from the centre tube and we would tear them off and suck out the sweetness.  I am living proof that they were not poisonous.

I had a brother.  He was four years younger than me so I could take no notice of him.  I was wise to the ways of the world by the time he came along and he was so dumb, he could not even walk.  But he learned to.  And then, one day, he kidnapped my teddy bear.

I did not tell Denis this.  The memory was too painful.  My brother - I guess he was about two years old at the time - stole my beloved teddy bear and dipped him into the handsomely full toilet pan and painted the result onto the walls.  He was well into the job when he was sprung by my mother.

There was a hullaballoo that he did not understand.  Dumb kid.  I was at school at the time so I was spared the sight of my teddy bear in deep shit.

Mum flushed my teddy bear out, boiled him in the copper and hung him by his ears to dry on the clothes line.  And that's where I found him when I came home from school.




 

Denis among the poppies