Gay your life must be

“My Dad’s got itchy feet” I would say. I don’t know where I first heard this phrase, but I parroted it often as a child, a vague but sufficient explanation for the fragmented answers I offered to “where did you….” questions. The assumption was that we were a military family. When I went to Sixth Form College and completed the full two years without moving, I set a personal record for time spent at any one educational institution. But we were not a military family. We were a family governed by a restless soul, for better and worse, and now, well into my adulthood, I am the restless governor of a home loving family.

I know where I picked it up of course, these itchy feet. It’s hard not to come back infected if you walk barefoot over enough rocks, smoothly mounded or perilously jagged, into enough bodies of cool, soft, icy, rushing, calm or tugging, water, over enough sand, coarse and scratchy or fine flour. When your toes have felt the dust scuff and the mud ooze in the private space beneath them, when your arches have curled away from spiny flora AND fauna, it is hard not to feel that itch irking your consciousness as you sit on your sofa. And the more you scratch, the more it mithers you.

I was ten or eleven, already in my seventh school and fostering my second regional accent when my dad decided we were moving from the UK to Australia. We travelled on an “Entrepreneur” visa, though there was no plan, and arrived in Sydney to a sprinkling of snow, and no epiphanal dawning. I imagine it was the combination of these factors which placed us on a domestic flight to Cairns a few days later, and when we arrived there, it transpired that the cruising altitude had brought us no closer to divine inspiration.

We then did what I suspect many of us with the compulsion to travel would do. We set of in hot pursuit of that evasive moment of dazzling clarity of purpose. Most journeys commence with shopping, and this was no different. We bought a large mustard yellow Ford Falcon, a four berth caravan, a 1989 road atlas of Australia, a set of bedding I have no recollection of ever pausing to wash, and the kitchen necessities. Then we unpacked our two suitcases into the storage compartments, and embarked.

The following morning, we bought the bucket.

Australia has a justifiable reputation for being somewhat riddled with things that can kill you. Largely, they do not, but three decades since we returned to England, I still knock my boots out before I put them on. The issue was this. Our caravan had no bathroom facilities. My dad’s conviction that a man with a caravan was most certainly not in need of a registered campsite meant the WE had no bathroom facilities. To this day, I am a master squatter, a skill I have been grateful for more times than I care to admit, but at that time, I was also capable of lasting an entire night without the need to pee. A bit like digesting food close to bedtime or undertaking gardening without grunting and groaning, this proved to be a physical attribute that I would not carry into midlife, and I now feel a great deal more empathy towards my mother, who could not. But nor could she bring herself to step out into the clamorous Australian night and pee in the bushes. And so the bucket was bought.

My brother and I were not keen on the bucket. To wake nightly to the sound of a hot stream of urine hitting the cavernous plastic was disgruntling to us, and though my dad was stoically supportive, he would have preferred her to run the gauntlet of the biting night creatures. But the bucket was bought, and emptying, swilling and stowing the bucket became as much a part of the morning routine as returning the bed to a sofa and lifting the jockey wheel. Had we known how long we would need it for, perhaps we would have splashed out on a bucket with a lid, for the bucket proceeded to accompany us for nearly a year through much of the magnificent diversity of landscape Australia has to offer.

That year continues to be one of the happiest of my life. Free of school, I learnt beneath the humid greens of the rainforest the fallacy of independence. I learnt the solace of cool flowing water. I learnt to be cautious of what lies beneath. In the bays of New South Wales I witnessed how the porpoise takes joy in the every day, and felt how trying to stand against a wave only knocks you down. I discovered how to dive into its rising if I wanted to keep moving out, and how to allow it to carry me if I was happy to move in. I learnt that jelly fish don’t mean to sting, but will sting you all the same if you don’t give them space, and I learnt to listen if someone who knows more about it that I warns of rip tides. In the red of the centre I saw in towering termite mounds how good design solves problems before they arise, and how inhospitality can sometimes be only a lack of knowledge. In the North, with men and women with skins of darkest brown, I learnt how stories inform identity, and how identity can be desecrated, but never stolen. Each evening, in the half hour candle glow we gifted ourselves before allowing the roadside night to close about us, I heard stories of my own culture in my father’s voice, a homecoming to a Victorian world of possibilities, regency parlours rife with intrigue, mysterious murders to be solved by wily amateur sleuths and redeeming quests elevating ordinary lives to the extraordinary. Each morning, I would wake with the light, and listen as night turned to day, the dawn chorus shifting as our habitat changed, reminding me daily that we were not in Kansas anymore.

It was a glorious time, when we could laugh at the stench of a rotting carcass, smelled miles before we passed it in a flurry of buzzards, and wonder at the wail of the koalas. We marvelled at cane toads living in toilet bowls and mobs of brumbies slowed by a feral donkey companion. We encountered one another, intimately, and found ourselves safe. But there came a day we turned around. We drove back, meandering less, stopping less whimsically, to a town we had passed in New South Wales some three or four hours north of Sydney, where porpoises had leapt in the estuary as pelicans watched from the foreshore. I don’t recall if that had been our destination or whether we were just on the look out for a likely candidate. Though my mother had been a teacher until I was 6 and had confidently expected to be able to keep up some lessons on the road, we had been far too busy learning, and eventually my parents decreed that we had been out of school long enough. We parked up on a campsite that allowed stays of up to six months. My brother and I wrapped ourselves back into school uniforms, and my parents sought the makings of a stable lifestyle. A few months later, we bought a house.

The morning we left the campsite we anticipated would be our last in our little home on wheels. It was not. The old pre-fab we had bought transpired to be so riddled with cockroaches that it is hard to describe without seeming hyperbolic, and we moved back into the caravan while we demolished it. But we believed our time in the van was at an end. That morning, my mum went to settle our bill as my brother and I helped my dad reverse the car to the hitch, readying to move off, a manoeuvre we had performed several hundred times. He checked all was in place before getting in the driver’s seat, and watched in his mirrors as we beckoned him back, a little bit left, a little bit right, keep it straight back now, ignore the sound of cracking plastic, keep it coming, and stop.

“What happened?” asked my mum.

Nonchalant, we glanced at the crushed bucket poking from beneath the car’s chassis.

“An accident” we chorused, without a shred of remorse.