Category: Australia

 

It was at the wake of my nephew that I heard a song called ´The Landslide´. 

I suppose in a way it was appropriate; the song triggered off a landslide in my emotions.

For a while, I found it hard to remain standing.

 

The wake was held on the second floor of an old building in inner city Melbourne.

The building, like most of the buildings in the area, was built during the 19th century.

This one had been extensively refurbished.

On the ground floor was a trendy café and restaurant. The second floor had been outfitted to cater for large functions. There were table and chairs near the windows at the front, a bar with a long wooden counter and behind the bar, a large room with stacks of chairs along the sides.

Despite the renovations, the past was evident especially on this second floor; the high ceiling, the wooden floorboards and in places, the brick walls left bare.

 

My nephew had died of cancer after a long and terrible battle. He was 27. My partner and I had flown to Australia from Europe to be with him during the last weeks and offer support to my sister and my niece. During the emotionally turbulent days that we went into the hospital to visit my nephew, many conflicting thoughts went through my head, like stray bullets in a war zone.

Strangely though, I did not experience sadness. I was unable to shed tears like my partner. 

Was this because I was a male? 

 

One day my nephew posted on his Facebook account: ‘Thanks for all the love that everyone has shown me. Now I want to go to a quiet place.’

He went to that quiet place and now, a week later, there we were at his wake.

Box of ashes on a table.

And it was there, late in the afternoon, that the sadness ambushed me. Out of the blue, so to speak.

I didn’t cry but rather, almost fainted. Dizzy spell. 

Yes, finally it caught up with me, the existential despair of living and dying.

The sheer madness of it all. 

 

There were over a hundred people there. People were chatting and drinking and standing around in groups. Most of them, friends of my nephew, were young. Some of the groups of young people lived in country towns in the north of Victoria, where my nephew had grown up; they had travelled to Melbourne in a bus to attend the wake and were scheduled to return that night. Others lived in Melbourne and knew him from the time that he had lived there. He had enjoyed his childhood in a country town and being a gregarious person had made a lot of friends. But he had never regretted the move to the big city. He loved the city life and going out to clubs and pubs with friends and drinking and talking. He liked going to see stand-up comedians and bands; he listened to a lot of music – rock, jazz, blues, country and western – everything and anything. As an old man, even I knew that he was a musical bower bird. We’d be driving along in his car and he’d say ‘listen to this’ and I’d ask questions and get a long story. I remember him giving me a long spiel about one of his favourite American artists, Charles Bradley. Then again there were groups even from my time as a youth that he listened to: Pink Floyd, Dire Straights, Hendrix, Doors. Sometimes I wondered how he got the time to listen to so much music.

It was something I was reminded of whilst Anya and I were standing around talking to various people and sipping white wine; in the background, some of my nephew’s favourite numbers were playing.

Then late in the afternoon a number began which I’d never heard before.

Somehow it flew in under the radar of the emotional barrier I’d constructed during the preceding weeks.

 

‘Climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down…’

 

One minute I’m standing there talking, voice raised to prevail over the music (though it was not loud), and the next minute, I’m struggling to remain standing. Hit by a wave of intense sadness. It was so powerful it was as if I was drowning.

Which music was this and why was it having such a powerful effect?

I left the group and walked slowly towards the windows. There were only a few people sitting at the tables and chairs. Most people had opted to stand. I needed to be on my own. I pulled up a chair and sat next to a window and drew in deep breathes.

The music kept playing and I found myself in a time warp, an emotional déjà vu.

 

I’m back there in the hospital on a Tuesday morning.

Two doctors appear at the doorway to his room. No white uniforms. An elderly man in a suit and a younger woman in an expensive dress.

Anya and I are asked to leave.

We find our way to the waiting room. It’s 10 am. There’s a TV on the wall and on the TV there’s a morning show from one of the commercial stations. It’s so hard to believe that anyone would want to waste their time watching this absolute trash. Yet there are, evidently, hundreds of thousands of people – or is it more? – out there in the great suburban wasteland, with nothing better to do than watch these young, glamorous people with witless babble and stereotype laughter.

What’s wrong with Australians?

How come they get sucked into this rubbish?

Is this an example of our so-called free society?

The freedom to be fed bullshit? To be brainwashed?

‘Coming after the break (i.e. after another burst of blitz advertising), a woman asks our astrologer about her son’s future!’

‘Her son’s future.’

You couldn’t invent a crueller, more grotesque irony if you tried.

 

Twenty minutes later my sister appears in the waiting room in tears.

‘The doctors have said there are no more treatment options left. The only thing left now is pain management.’

Walking down the sterile hospital corridor. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go into that room. Can’t we put it off? I have to go.

 

‘Obviously I’m disappointed’ he says.

(Disappointed!?)

‘But now it’s come this far, I want to go. I don’t want to hang around any longer. I want to die in comfort, peace and dignity.’

Anya and my sister in tears.

Not me.

I’m staring at this man and wondering how it’s possible than anyone can be so courageous and so forthright confronted with the reality of death.

During the following days it’s the same: after every visit, I walk out the hospital feeling more inspired than sad.

He’s polite to the staff. Never a trace of anger or resentment. He’s dying as he lived. Not a mean bone in his body.

One thought echoes through my soul like a voice echoing in a cave: ‘I hope that when my time comes to die, I can be like him.´

Days pass. Every morning we visit him.

No sadness.

A storm of emotions, but sadness somehow missing. Anger at the death of a young man before he had the chance to have a life. Guilt at having reached the age I have. And the  recurring question:

Can I die with that sort of courage?

To go out graciously?

 

I looked down at the street below.

It was almost deserted.

The winter sun was hanging low on the horizon, casting a luminescent light over the buildings.

There weren’t people around and the ones that were there, seemed unreal, like silhouettes.

What were any of us besides silhouettes?

What would Life bring them, those stray souls walking the darkening streets on a Sunday afternoon? Happiness, sadness, confusion, doubt, good times and bad times and then, nothing, a great darkness.

There it was before me, the strange farce of living and dying. 

Despite all our progress, all our modern pretensions, nothing had changed since the time we had wandered the great wilderness areas of our planet in tribes; we were inevitably confronted by two resounding mysteries, birth and death, and no matter how we tried to explain those mysteries, to unravel the unexplainable, there we were, confronted by a fathomless abyss.

What had Nietzsche once said?

‘Those who stare into the abyss run the risk of having the abyss stare into them.’ 

The voices sang and the abyss stared right through me, like a cold wind.

Somehow I remained standing.

 

 

The song finished and I recovered.

I saw my sister standing over near the bar.

I went over there and putting on air, a necessary light- heartedness, I asked her: ‘Hey, what song was that?’

Her answer was automatic: ‘The Landslide, Dixie Chics’

 

‘Dixie Chics?’

I’d vaguely heard of this group. Three women. I’d read somewhere that they’d caused a controversy by publicly opposing the American invasion of Iraq during the presidency of George Bush.

How dare they.

 

Dixie Chics. The Landslide. I made a mental note of it. The number that had almost sent me over the edge.

As night descended, Anya and I left. We walked back to the apartment we’d been renting for the previous month. We followed a bike path. A full moon hung in the sky like a child’s balloon.

Back in the apartment I got on to You Tube. Normally I was looking for classical music and opera.

This time it was different.

 

Ah, there it was: The Landslide. Dixie Chics.

Everything came back in a flash; the swooning, the standing near the window, the memories of the recent past, the intense experience of the present. Watching people on the street.

Whilst listening to the music, I scrolled down the page and read the comments that people had made about the clip. Several people mentioned that the original version of the song by Stevie Nicks (who wrote it) was better.

I listening to Stevie Nicks version of The Landslide and it was true, it was better, slower and more sensitive.

Yet it wasn’t the version I kept on my bookmarks.

It was the Dixie Chics’ version which I had heard that afternoon and which was indelibly engraved on my consciousness. It was this version which inevitably brought with it a flood of images and memories.

And a sudden wave of sadness, intense sadness. 

 
‘Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Mmm

And I’m gettin’ older, too’

 

Continuing from the previous blog ‘The Secret’

https://serioustravelblog.com/2017/09/13/the-secret/

 

‘How do we wish to remember Dorothy May Jenkinson (nee Werfel) as we bid her our last farewell?

As a woman of frail health who against great odds lived to a ripe old age?

As a mother who loved her children yet often left them perplexed by her sometimes strange and unpredictable ways?

All of these – and yet something more.

When we look at the full context of her life, with all its tragedies and set-backs, we discover a woman who was in her own way, a feminist pioneer, a woman who fought hard to determine the architecture of her life at a time when she was expected to do the opposite.

Let us recall the life of this woman in that light.

This is how she would like to be remembered.

She was proud and strong willed. She needed to be.

Born in 1929 to a German father and Scottish mother, Dorothy was raised in a religious, working class family where discipline was rigidly enforced and the slightest infraction was punished. She was the younger of two daughters and hence, arrived as a disappointment for her parents who had hoped for a son. In this loveless, cold family life, she found one great compensation: the piano.

In an age when people made their own music, it was normal for children to receive lessons in playing a musical instrument. From an early age Dorothy displayed great talent. By her late teens, she was good enough to be accepted by the Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide.

She never got there. Her parents made it clear that they would not support her if she attended the Conservatorium. In their view, the purpose of a woman was to get married and have children. This was the dominant mentality of the times.

We should stop and reflect on this episode.

How different her life might have been if she had been able to develop her natural talent.
And how frustrating it must have been to be denied that chance because of her gender.

If a woman was to gain employment of any kind in those days, it was in an office. Dorothy completed a course in typing and short-hand and went to work in the Harbours Board where she met her first husband and the father of her three children, Laurie Curtis.

When she got married, she was forced to give up her job. The rule in those days was that a married woman could not work. Their place was at home. A woman like Dorothy, who could not accept this situation was considered unnatural.

In 1952, her husband, who was in the Air Force, was stationed on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. Dorothy remained in Adelaide to await the birth of her first son, Peter. Then she got on a ship with her baby and did the long voyage alone to join up with her husband. The three years she spent on Malta was a time of great happiness. She had a piano in her apartment and played the organ at the church services for the Australian and British contingents.

In 1956, her husband was relocated to Australia, by which time, Dorothy was pregnant with her second child, Lynette. During the following years, life was tough as the family was moved from one remote Air Force base to the other. There were none of the conveniences which we take for granted today. Dorothy spent her days alone with her two children in temporary accommodation.

Dorothy wanted more out of life. She was too intelligent and too talented to be content with the role of mother and housekeeper. She railed against the ethos of the times. She was prone to periods of depression, hardly surprising given her circumstances. But when she made up her mind about something, she was very strong willed. She would not be defeated.

With the birth of her third child, David, she was adamant that she wanted a permanent place of residence, where she could raise her family – and study accountancy. It was due to her pressure that Laurie quit the Air Force. A permanent legacy of resentment remained, which eventually led to Dorothy and Laurie being divorced.

In the early 1960’s, it was very unusual for a mother of three to be studying at university. Dorothy was one of three women in a class of over 100 men. She did something which no one questions today but was regarded as a scandal then: she studied and she had a family. She qualified with flying colours and went on to work for a prestigious Adelaide accounting firm.

But even her time of success had a shadow side. The best and only woman friend she ever had, died at an early age of cancer. Her marriage always troubled, became acrimonious. Trying to balance her tumultuous home life as a mother and her career as an independent woman proved to be emotionally exhausting. Besides a selfish and conceited husband, there was a rebellious teenage son and daughter. There was a generational conflict and new ideas of social progress were emerging. Among them, was feminism.

But Progress came too late for Dorothy.

In the wake of her divorce, her triumph in a male-dominated world came as a bitter-sweet one. She wanted peace, and she found it with her second husband, John Jenkinson. In John, she found an enduring friendship and a time of contentment.

She and John led an active life as retirees; they worked for charities – and also travelled to Europe, Asia and Africa.

In 1991 John died.

Dorothy never really recovered from this last blow.

She spent the next 26 years dealing with the great epidemic of our modern times, loneliness. Her health deteriorated. If the great battle of her earlier life was to assert herself as a woman, in later life, it was to deal with pain. It was a battle which she ultimately lost.

But even in the twilight years of her life, all of us experienced times when she was her old self: a lively woman, with opinions about world politics and a great sense of humour. A woman capable of wise insights and always ready for a joke.

Today in Australia, the right of women to realise their potential is something beyond dispute. Let us all be grateful for that. Let us also pause to remember those women who rebelled against a sexist, male dominated society – and too often, like Dorothy, paid a high price for it.

That’s how we should remember Dorothy: a woman who was raised to conform, denied her right to develop her talents, and refused to accept her position.

And if she often seemed to us as unpredictable, up one day, down the next, let us not forget the hard life she lived and the price she paid for her right to live as a woman.

The last person she saw before she died was her son David. That is more than fitting because no one did more for Dorothy than he did. ‘

 

 

 

 

The Simpson Desert?

I didn’t know much about the Simpson Desert.

I knew it lay in somewhere in central Australia and much further north than we were going.

I kind of wondered why anyone would want to go there.

Consider the daunting dimensions of the GAF: it included the western areas of Queensland and New South Wales, most of the South Australia and Western Australia and much of the Northern Territory. Thousands upon thousands of square kilometres of nothing, dry, dead, wasteland or something mighty close to it. It was surely the biggest wasteland in the world.

Why would anyone want to select a specific part of that enormous Fuck-All and go to the effort – and expense – of driving there?

Sven informed me that the Simpson Desert covered an area of around 170,000 square kilometres.

Enough said.

I observed, perhaps a bit cynically, that driving around through hundreds of kilometres of sand wasn’t something which could inspire me much.

 

Then Sven began talking about camels.

Before I knew it, I found myself in the company of a different person entirely.

From a quiet, almost taciturn man, he metamorphosed into a chatter-box.

 

Camels!

Oh yes! He was big on camels.

As big as I was on yellow foots.

He’d spent a lot of time in the Middle East working for a big Danish engineering firm; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. There he’d become interested in camels, gone to camel races, gone on camel safaris, talked to the locals about camels and eaten camel stew with rice.

He knew a lot about camels in Australia.

He was really looking forward to seeing the camels in the Simpson Desert.

 

I can’t say I knew much about camels in Australia, only that they were feral and therefore, as far as I was concerned, a creature which had no right to exist. Which didn’t belong here.

‘Feral’: it was a word often used in Australia and in many different contexts. In essence, it meant a domesticated creature which had returned to a wild state. It was also used to describe people who had left the city and gone to live in the bush and in the process become anti-social as well as a bit mad. Feral could also be used to describe someone who had become so obsessed with something that they could no longer see the wood for the trees. Politicians for example might describe their opponents as being feral or having gone feral.

Whatever its uses, ‘feral’ unlike so many other words in the Australian lexicon, was never used in a positive sense. It always implied something negative or undesirable. In a language where even the word ‘bastard’ could be used to denote one’s best friend, the uniformly negative implications of ‘feral’ was striking, to say the least.

‘Ah, Sven….why do you want to see feral camels?

‘They are pure.’

‘Pure?

Pure feral?’

I had a feeling I was missing something here – lost in translation maybe?

We eventually surmounted the misunderstandings between Denmark and Australia.

 

Sven knew his camels and knew a lot about the pure feral camels of the Simpson Desert.

He told me about how camels were brought to Australia during the late 1800’s and used to transport supplies up north because unlike horses and bullocks, they could survive long periods of time in the unrelenting harshness of the desert. Sven’s voice became almost passionate as he described how long lines of them, loaded up with boxes and bags, were led into the interior by camel drivers. Camels, he said with great emphasis, had played a crucial role in the construction of the telegraph lines and railways linking the south of the continent to the north. They had helped to build the Australian nation at a crucial point in its history.

In the 1920’s, they were superseded by the trains and later, roads. The camel drivers, rendered obsolescent, released their camels into the desert – where against steep odds, the camels proceeded to proliferate at an incredible rate. Current estimates put the number of wild camels at well over half a million.

‘Sven…where does the purity come into this?

‘These camels, they were isolated. They couldn’t interbreed with other strains of camels. They don’t have diseases.’

He explained to me how the camels in the Middle East were riddled with diseases. Australian camels were disease-free. There was a big export market for them. He had first heard about the Aussie camels in Saudi Arabia.

What a loopy world this was! The species we didn’t want bred like flies. The ones we did want were struggling.

If only the yellow foots could turn feral and the camels become endangered.

‘I’ve got nothing against camels Sven, it’s just that they don’t belong here’

‘Nothing belongs nowhere these days’

A strange way to put it but I knew what he meant.

 

Mozart and camels; Sven and I.

A point came when I got tired of listening to Sven and his camel talk.

It happened quickly, like the sun disappearing behind a stray cloud.

A shadow passed across me. A darkness appeared within me.

‘Over half a million disease free camels roaming central Australia.’

Sven found that impressive, a tribute to the species’ unbelievably hardiness.

I found the idea depressing.

Sven’s camels were doing a lot better than my yellow foots.

He and I were both headed into empty spaces in search of our obsessions but that was where our similarities began and ended.

The dramatic change in his demeanour when we got onto the subject of camels underlined not only the intensity of his obsession but also the sheer vitality of the species itself. I had done my best to reign in my obsession with the yellow foot in order to spare Sven and Ella a rant – only to find myself in the company of this Great Dane who observed no such restraint.

Maybe my reluctance to drill people about the yellow foot reflected my sympathy for a Loser in the Darwinian struggle of the contemporary Australian animal kingdom.

In my identification with that beautiful endangered species, I had the support of the politically correct on my side, of the Australian middle class and the Greens and the Left. But Sven had something far more powerful on his side: success. The camels had bred from a limited gene pool and now there were hundreds of thousands of them, somehow flourishing in an impossible land.

I began to actually resent Sven. The transforming intensity of his obsession cast mine into a pale shadow. It was all very unfair; he and his camels were on a winning ticket and my beautiful wallabies and I were struggling to find a reason to exist.

 

My rising irritation with Sven was crazy of course but that was how I felt. There were all sorts of feral thoughts going through my mind; me the same person who detested ferals and judged them harshly.

Look, the problem was this: the success of the feral camels, expressed by an exuberant man in the clutches of something close to a passion, was a powerful metaphor for the success, the vitality of so many other feral species in Australia including; rabbits, foxes, cats and goats – all of these forming formidable obstacles to the successful reintroduction of any native species – including the beautiful outback Jacob: the yellow foot.

The image of Sven leading a long line of camels into an expanse of sand appeared before me accompanied by doubts as thick and pestering as a swarm of flies.

All that stuff I’d talked about, that noble talk about how the reintroduction of the yellow foot was symbolic of our national identity and so on – seemed like so much bullshit.

Why were we working so hard, spending so much money, to reintroduce native species into their original environment?

The long term chances of survival of these reintroduced species were generally speaking low.

The fact was, they couldn’t cope with the competition from the feral species. In other words the ferals could do what time and again the natives couldn’t: proliferate in a harsh land.

So why try?

Surely it was better, and very much cheaper, to leave them in the zoos.

How many millions of dollars were being spent on eradicating the foxes, goats and rabbits?

And even then, my darling yellow foot was struggling.

It all seemed so unfair. Sven and Ella were on their way to see their feral camels and were absolutely reassured of seeing them, nothing more certain. For us on the other hand, our chances of seeing the yellow foot were altogether more unlikely.

 

Sven just kept talking and wouldn’t shut up.

Camels!

I wondered about Ella.

I formed a picture in my head of Sven returning from a trip to the Middle East and greeting Ella in their luxurious apartment in Copenhagen with his camel chatter.

Was Ella as interested in camels as he or did she just go along with it?

Maybe their apartment or house or wherever they lived was filled with pictures of camels – and carvings and statues of camels. I once met a couple in Rotterdam who were obsessed with hippopotami; their large apartment was filled with photos and models and carvings of hippos.

Maybe Sven and Ella’s place was like that, only it was camels, not hippos.

Maybe when Sven and Ella had sex, Sven was thinking about camels.

 

I stopped listening to Sven and drifted off on Mozart.

From the back seat, I heard the sounds of Anya and Ella talking. It sounded like a lively conversation.

On the left of us, to the accompaniment of Mozart’s ‘Linz’ Symphony, were small, sparse pines, so dark green they were almost black, and towering above them, a high ridge orange coloured, bone-like.

Instead of dropping us off at Blinman, Sven took a detour – and quite a considerable one – and drove us to the Caravan Park at Angorchina. The road there was unsealed and strewn with rocks and boulders; it passed through low, dry hills intersected with creek beds and in places, the road rose and fell so sharply that it seemed as if we were traversing a series of geological waves. I felt guilty about Sven, guilty about feeling jealous of him because of his absolute certainty of seeing his favourite animal – contrasted to the extreme uncertainty of me seeing the yellow foot. He was a nice guy and his driving us to Angorchina saved us quite a trip (we had planned on the following day to either hitch hike or walk out there).

That night, whilst Anya and I were discussing our stroke of luck in getting a ride with Sven and Ella, I opined that as far as I could see, they made a good couple. To which Anya replied:

They’re not a couple. They’re brother and sister.

Brother and sister?

And then, close on the heels of this small revelation, another:

‘They’re twins.’

What?

What kind of nonsense was this? 

How can two people who don’t resemble one another be twins? If they’re twins then so are we.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘You’re right I don’t understand!. As far as I know twins are supposed to resemble one another otherwise they’re not twins are they?’

Anya proceeded to tell the story which Ella had told her whilst Sven was belabouring me with his camels.

On my part, not much chance for humour then.  

 

‘Sven is my younger brother. He’s three years younger.

He and I were both born into twins: I had a twin brother and he had a twin sister.

Our mother and father had immigrated to Australia and we were living in Newcastle. They were poor working class. Dad worked in the smelters. We lived in a simple asbestos house, one of many, all of them arranged in neat rows. Life wasn’t easy. Then my brother and I were born and the real misery began.

You see I was born normal, but my twin brother was born with a serious intellectual disability. He was a very difficult child. He had to go to a special school. It was a nightmare for my parents. Then my mother got pregnant again and would you believe it? The same thing happened again: twins, a boy and a girl, one born normal and the other, with a serious intellectual disability, only this time it was the girl who inherited the genetic defects.

My parents gave up.

The new country had brought only hardship and suffering. They had two seriously handicapped children. They went back to Denmark. The social services there are much better than in Australia and by that time, the wages were higher also. Not that life was a bed of roses back home. The problems with our brother and sister hung like a cloud over our family. It was as if we had been cursed by an evil spirit.

Sven and I grew up wondering why we had been born normal and nor our brother and sister. No matter what we did, we were followed everywhere by a long shadow. We bore a heavy burden just to be alive and to be normal. Neither of us ever really found a way of dealing with it. Our brother and sister ended up dying young – in their 30’s – after bouts of drink and drugs and constantly being in and out of institutions. My parents suffered enormously, no matter how hard Sven and I tried to cheer them up.

Sven and I grew up during the ‘60’s but we missed out on it. There was the politics and the idealistic causes and really, it was young people celebrating their youth. There were new drugs like marihuana and LSD, there was the pill and free love; everyone wanted to experience life, to do something else other than live the conventional life. But it was not for us. We had this cloud hanging over us. We were different. I studied hard to become a teacher and outside of studies, I became very religious. I needed God. I became a member of a Christian club, an unfashionable thing to do in those days. It was through this group than I met my husband Jan. He came from a village in a part of Denmark where the people are very religious. We got married and went to live near his village. We had two children, a boy and a girl. Both times when I got pregnant, I prayed to God that I would not have twins, that what had happened to my mother would not happen to me. I felt guilty because if that was what God had in store for me then it was my duty to accept it. So for the whole time I was pregnant, which for most women is a time of fulfilment, of joy, I was in purgatory. ‘God, dear God, please spare me what happened to my mother’.

Sven studied engineering but he didn’t turn to religion. Instead he became very conventional. He made being normal a kind of religion. He got married to a very unambitious kind of woman who didn’t want to do anything other than raise children and cook meals and read women’s magazines. Sven got a good job with a large company, he went to work every day, bought a nice house and drove a nice car and every year, went with the family to Spain during the summer and Sweden during the winter. He never did anything out of the ordinary. He was always very reserved.

The years passed and my kids grew up and left home and Jan and I got older. Jan and I lost our belief. It was a slow process. The doubts grew over the years. Early one Sunday morning during the winter, he and I went ice skating on a frozen lake. It was a beautiful sunny day with a clear sky. The temperature was well under zero and everything was covered in a layer of white. We felt like children as we raced along over the ice. We laughed and did stupid things. It was possible to feel God’s presence on a morning like that. Later that day, we went to church. At the end of the service, as everyone filed out the door, the reverend took Jan aside and said:

‘Now Jan, tell me what you think about people who go ice skating on the day of the Lord.’

That was the breaking point for us.

We stopped going to church. We had been going there every Sunday for over 20 years. This had consequences for us; people in the village treated us differently, as if we were strangers in their midst. What was far worse was that our own children rejected us, especially our son. He was married to a very devout woman who came from another village where they followed a much stricter version of Christianity than we did in our village. He was certain that we would burn in hell. Our daughter thought the same thing though in time, she learnt to accept our decision. We couldn’t get angry with our children because we had brought them up to believe in God; we had taken them to church every Sunday and read the bible with them in the evenings. They had grown up following our example and they felt betrayed when we stopped believing in God. We could understand this of course but you can’t continue to believe in God just because it will help you get on with your children and your neighbours better.

When we retired, Jan and I bought a camper van and began travelling around Europe. Two years ago he died of a heart attack whilst we were in Portugal. He was only 63. In the meantime, Sven’s marriage ended. After years of being the conventional mother and home maker, his wife suddenly decided that she wanted more out of life. The children had left home and were working. She went off with one of the directors of the company where Sven was working. Sven had tried so hard to create a little oasis of peace and happiness in his life, and it all came to pieces. That had happened to me too, only in a different way.

After Jan’s funeral, I spent more time with Sven. For many years we hardly saw one another; at the funerals of our brother and sister and then our parents; sometimes at Christmas and on the birthdays of our children. We phoned each other a few times a year. Circumstances brought us back together; my husband had died and his wife had left him and each of us were abandoned, alone; we had no one else to turn to, he and I, the normal ones, the left-overs from the twins.

One day Sven got an idea. Travel to Australia to see the camels. He started reading about the camels in Central Australia. It was something to help him dig himself out of a deep hole. I was in a deep hole too. We were both suicidal and needed something, some plan.

Yes, let’s go to Australia and see the camels!

Both of us had lived sheltered lives. We were in our mid- 60’s and we had never really done anything except finding ways to be safe. Why were we born healthy and sane and our brother and sister destined to suffer such terrible lives? We had never been able to answer that and so we were never able to really be at peace with ourselves.

We have no plans and don’t know where we are going. Sven loves to drive, he just wants to drive and drive and get lost in the emptiness and listen to his classical music. Since we have been here in this country we realise that we still have much to live for.

We will see the camels and go on a camel safari. After that, no plans, only one; we will not go back to Denmark.

I’m thinking that maybe when we get to Darwin, we’ll go to Indonesia and travel around. Sven doesn’t care. As long as he’s somewhere, he’s happy.

Who knows where we will go? ‘