Collecting kindling, putting a match

There wasn’t much of a fence between my place and Jim and Cathy’s. Just a row of posts and some wire strung between. A year or so after I moved in, we decided to hang a gate between two of the posts so we didn’t have to walk all the way down to the street to visit each other. Jim found an old piece of reo mesh which served the purpose, and hinged it to one of those posts, with fasteners on the other one.

A few years later the Mechanic moved in with me. He and Jim soon became friends, both of them practical, helpful, neighbourly types. From my office I would often see them shooting the breeze over the gate, Jim standing at that regulation, rural-male, metre-and-a-half distance. They would often still be there when I checked again half an hour later, if they hadn’t disappeared into Jim’s shed or the Mechanic’s workshop to consult on a project.

One late autumn afternoon I was collecting kindling from under the old silky oak. Over the fence, Jim was putting a match to a pile of logs and prunings. He crouched to blow on the flickering flame then stood up and went off to his shed, coming back with a six-pack of stubbies. He set them down on an upended milk crate, twisted the lid off one of them and stood there, pensively, watching the fire spread. I decided not to interrupt his reverie.

A little later I came out again for some reason or another, and noticed that Jim’s neighbour from the other side had joined him, and one from across the road. While I watched, another neighbour wandered down the driveway. I don’t know why but I had the distinct impression that they hadn’t been invited, per se. Perhaps they’d seen the smoke, like a signal. Light a fire and blokes will come? A line came to me: ‘Nobody owns a fire’.

I went back inside and wrote a scene. That scene, years later, became the opening of Colin and Phil’s story, titled ‘Nobody Owns a Fire’, in my novel Garnet. Of course, a scene is not necessarily a story. I needed tension. What Colin did at the end of that scene surprised me, but I definitely had my tension! And where the story went from there… well, that was pure fiction.

Jim did double duty for me in Garnet. Apart from starting a bonfire on that autumn afternoon, he also unadvisedly dumped a small pile of fresh lawn clippings over his back fence for a hungry horse to eat. The horse got colic and died, and the horse’s (fictional) owner, Hetty, wanted reparation. Now Jim was called Stan and had been drawn into a subterfuge in which he felt increasingly uncomfortable (as, indeed, the real Jim would have).

Is Hetty real? Okay, yes. But no further than the point where she arrives to announce that the horse is dead. But let’s be clear, she has not lost a son to suicide. And she definitely does not hang washing on her front fence to dry.

Garnet is the name of a small village in dairy country, the setting of Garnet. And I live in Quaama, a small village in dairy country. So when people ask me, ‘Is Garnet actually Quaama?’ the best answer I can come up with is that no, it isn’t, but Quaama residents may recognise some settings, or events, or situations – or even idiosyncrasies of their neighbours. I’ve been living here for 28 years now and some of these things… well, they just had to be documented.

On New Year’s Eve in 2019 our small village went up in flames, victim to the Black Summer Bushfires. We lost fourteen houses that night, about twenty percent of our total dwellings, and our little weatherboard church. The Mechanic and I had evacuated shortly before the fire arrived – the Mechanic was reluctant to go but I was useless for firefighting; in fact I was less than useless, I was a liability. So we packed the dogs and some bags in the cars and took off down the highway.

The next morning, under the preternaturally smoky, orange skies of Bega, I rang Jim and Cathy, heart in mouth. Cathy answered and let me know that our house was still standing, as was theirs and the houses on either side of us. Jim had saved all four with his underground water tank and fire hoses and sheer obstinacy. The Mechanic has since felt a degree of remorse about not being there to help (Jim never held it against him). But something in Jim had changed. It was almost imperceptible, the change, but no more metre-and-a-half distance. Now he stood right up at the fence when they chatted.

While I was writing and rewriting and structuring and restructuring Garnet, I occasionally told Jim a bit about the characters that were based on him. He would laugh his big laugh and tell me, ‘I’ll look forward to reading that!’ And I looked forward to it, too. Sadly, Jim died suddenly last September, five months before Garnet was released.

Jim Blanchfield, you are sadly missed. But I hope that your big personality and some of your neighbourliness, practicality and endless generosity live on in my book.