Voltaire's Garden

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Book Excerpt

Prologue - A Garden in Ghana

I force open my eyes and throw off the covers. Daylight filters through shuttered windows. Before I rise, I take in the bright-blue walls of this sparsely furnished room, walls that at night crawl with large spiders. I’m amazed none had bothered to crawl over me.

I wrap myself in a sarong and join Colin in the living room. We breakfast, shower, and pack in silence, not wanting to leave as we close the door behind us.

Despite the early hour, sunlight belts down on my hat through a dusty, smoke haze. It’s February 2001 and the Harmattan, a seasonal wind blowing Saharan dust into the tropical rain forests of West Africa’s coastal fringe, has come early again and is set to last weeks longer than it used to. Fires smoulder on the forest fringes, the forest that is receding year on year, leaving parched earth behind. The World Bank funded saw mill somewhere up the road isn’t helping. Neither is climate change.

Eight-thirty, and I feel like another bucket shower. Heading towards the school we walk along the main street of Pampawie, a remote village situated far up the tongue of land between the River Volta and the Togoan border in Ghana’s mid-northeast. Pampawie, a ribbon of mud-brick dwellings with no telecommunications and an unreliable electricity supply. Here and there a shade tree rises out of the parched earth, its foliage offering momentary relief from the sun. Deep dish drains flank the street. When the rains come, they come heavy. There are no cars. Just chickens scratching, dogs lying in the shade.

Women in brightly-coloured dresses and headscarves are gathered near the communal kitchens in the market square. They watch us as we walk by. Four girls balancing large bowls of water on their heads approach and we move out of their way. Old men sitting under corrugated-iron verandas take sidelong glances at us before carrying on chatting or dreaming.

Agnes and Genevieve join us and walk to either side of me, their straight backs and swinging hips evidence of their female power and self-esteem. Walking between them with their arms brushing mine and I’m awash with filial affection as I struggle to match their gait, but I am out of shape and suffering badly from influenza. My guts are not faring well either. Was it the lettuce leaf I ate back in Accra, or the Ghanaian beer? Either way I, along with my colleague and fellow teacher Colin, have been punishing the pit toilet provided for our personal use by our host, John.

Agnes touches my arm as we near the centre of the village, pointing to her home. She smiles a sweet, closed-mouth smile. I nod and smile in silence. We have become good friends, Genevieve, Agnes and I. Like soul-sisters with a bent for laughter, in one week we have bypassed cultural and language differences through a shared, and perhaps a little wicked, sense of humour. Colin has become the butt of a whole string of jokes, his English demeanour and lack of physical flexibility compared to his African counterparts arousing great merriment and an intimate common ground between us. Luckily, good-natured Colin joins in the merriment. Looking back, I am sure it was those moments of mirth and intimacy that made my legs walk the distance to the school each day without collapsing.

As we approach the school buildings my pace quickens, drawn by the shade of the deep veranda facing the quadrangle, and my special seat, a comfy armchair covered in protective if sweat-inducing plastic. Students congregate outside, lining up in their orange and brown uniforms for the assembly. A woman approaches with a platter of orange slices. I slurp and dribble for a while, the fresh-picked taste compulsive. Agnes looks on and then touches my arm again.

‘Isobel, too many oranges are not good for the stomach.’

‘Next time I will come in mango season,’ I reply with a grin, little knowing there would be no next time.

Colin sits beside me and fiddles with the digital video camera.

We had arrived in Ghana two weeks earlier, ambassadors from our own high school, Polesworth, a village near Birmingham. We came here to formalise the school link I founded through the auspices of the On The Line millennium project established by Oxfam and other charities to link schools and communities on the Greenwich meridian. To kick off the link we agreed to create a garden in each school and I secured funding from the British Council for a teacher exchange on that basis.

With the last of the students assembled, the principal Peter starts another round of speeches. After a week of meetings, discussions and celebrations, each event prefaced by speeches, I am relieved this will be the last. Public speaking is not my forte, especially unscripted, and the wretched way I have felt this week has rendered me almost mute. Thank heavens for Colin, whose easy style and charm, in combination with the loud voice of an industrial arts teacher, fulfilled our public speaking obligations magnificently. I just smiled and nodded.

This time we are not required to say anything. With the talking over, the children sing. With one voice, so rich, sweet and melodic, they bid us farewell. I am mesmerized and my jaw drops a little in wonder at the harmonious sound I hear from the mouths of these sweet children. My eyes well with tears as I stare into their faces beaded with perspiration, their eyes filled with hope. Will the garden help them to grow as people? Will they come to understand the deep power that comes from planting a seed, nurturing a seedling, watching it flourish and flower, and harvesting its fruit? Will they make the connection between a seed and themselves? It is a big ask. A metaphor only exists when we recognize it so. Without this recognition, this insightful layering of meaning remains hidden from our minds, its fluttering wings tiny ripples of knowing in our hearts alone.

The students head back to their classrooms. There is no sign of the car that is due to collect us for the drive back to Accra so Peter suggests a quick last look at the main purpose of our visit – the site for the garden that will commemorate our link. I leave the shade reluctantly and follow Colin and Peter as they stroll across the quadrangle to the chosen site. Back at Polesworth we have earmarked a site for a garden too. The gardens will symbolise the link, providing in plants a constant reminder of the new collaboration between our two wildly disparate high schools – Polesworth, which boasts a state-of-the-art drama theatre and new computer lab, and Pampawie, which is sadly short of chalk, and where the children learn to count with stones and write with sticks.

Peter explains the need for a fence to keep the animals out as I look once more at the perimeter of stones surrounding a large flat rectangle of dry grass, a long way from my early morning vision. However the garden turns out to be, it is already a source of great inspiration, capturing the imagination and enthusiasm of the teaching staff at Pampawie. Gardens are special places, each one the result of human creation. As a symbol of a link between two schools I can think of no better way to begin the linking process.

Our car pulls into the school grounds. The driver smiles and shakes our hands. It is time to leave. I glance at Colin. He fumbles with the camera so I turn to take one last look around. My eyes settle on the school’s only garbage bin, a small hand-woven basket nestling in the crotch of a trifurcated log planted in the ground.

My heart is heavy. I want to go home and not go home all at once. I want the comfort of my own bed, but I want to take the generosity of spirit I found here with me, the spirit of Africa that has captured me the way it has countless others. In song, in tears, in laughter and in tragedy, this spirit lives. I cannot bear the thought of all the human suffering that goes on in countries like Ghana with a history blighted by slavery and colonization, countries rendered crushingly poor through the economic processes of unfairness, where the economic dictates of a few wealthy individuals and corporations in the North can render so many in the South so economically insecure. Would that I could wave a magic wand and fix it all right now, but I can’t. Would that I could bottle the spirit of Africa and take it home as an elixir but I cannot do that either.

All I can do is hope the link would lessen some of the unfairness.

Issues of fairness, or social justice, are never far from my mind. I visit them on a daily basis in my classroom. Like the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, or Buddha, I believe a moderate life based around considered personal limits is the best kind of life to lead. To reasonably know when we’ve had enough and before we indulge in excess is a happy life, a pleasurable life, one not driven by desires for wealth and power. I hope my Ghanaian friends will carry into their hearts and minds the simple pleasures found in their garden, of watching a plant grow, of smelling a flower, tasting a fruit, listening to birds, watching insects and soaking in the atmosphere. I hope that both gardens will help to transform lives.

One: Creating a New Dream

‘You must have a magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the Turk.

‘Only twenty acres,’ replied the Turk. ‘My children help me to farm it, and we find that the work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice and poverty.’ – Candide

Blackbutt Drive was a cul-de-sac. At the end, a granite boulder held open a farm gate. Filled with excitement and fear I walked through the gate as if crossing a threshold, about build a new home and garden on fifteen acres of fallow cattle paddock. I had a want-list seared into my mind and the determination of Hercules to make it happen. There would be vegetable gardens, herb gardens and orchards of fruit and nut trees all grown organically; chickens, sheep and trees for firewood; and native shrubberies and flowers everywhere. We’d have solar panels and a windmill. And guest accommodation, bed-and-breakfast style. A model of self-sufficiency, a source of inspiration for others. I was agent provocateur again. Only this time, in Cobargo, a quaint Australian village on the south coast of New South Wales. A logical if unlikely choice of retreat. Logical, in that I was following a family tradition set in the 1970s when my maternal grandmother built a house there. My mother and sister did the same in the 1980s. Unlikely, in that as my family called Cobargo home, I had wandered the world looking for mine.

I’d had little expectation of staying this time. Then I met Greg, a Slovenian Australian with a degree in philosophy. Originally from Sydney, Greg moved down the coast a decade earlier searching for a better life. After three failed ventures he bought a dilapidated cottage in the village, did odd-jobs for cash and received a modest stipend for editing a local magazine. The day we met, I was drawn to him immediately. With him, I saw a chance of permanence. After fifty-five addresses, I wanted an immovable physical centre, somewhere for my daughters to grow into adults, a solid foundation for a new life. So I married him.

I strolled down the driveway to the house site. The autumn sun shone through a stand of red gums in the far corner of the block. Luminescing wispy mists hovered over the dams, creeks and gullies to the west. Above the mists, where the mountains rose to meet the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range, the forests glowed mellow orange. A view captivating at any time, now splendidly silhouetted against the lightening sky, revealing in relief the curvaceous layering of peaks, ridges, spurs and saddles, and gorges and ravines. It was exhilarating, a confirmation of a decision well-made.

Greg was already at work. He’d driven up at dawn. He was on his knees scoring a square into hard clay on the house pad, his muscle-bound torso bundled in a sheepskin jacket, his elfin face buried in a balaclava. Having spent our savings on the excavations we couldn’t afford to hire a back hoe. We were doing things manually while we waited for the sale of Greg’s cottage to complete. Greg would most likely have dug the footings regardless. It was his way. He had a Luddite approach to modern life. ‘Why use a mechanical device when peasants have for centuries coped well enough with simple hand tools?’ he would say. For him, empowerment was gripping his hoe.

He continued to make hard jabs with the corner of a spade.

Behind him, obscuring the view of the village was a heap of sun-baked soil and another of sand, rubble and broken concrete – the remains of someone’s former driveway. Greg wanted the concrete for crazy paving.

To the west, a felled apple gum lay in its tangle of branches and leaves, a sacrifice to make way for the septic system. To the northwest, the view was unmolested by the chaos of the build. Two mounds of clay and scores of topsoil humps littered the north-facing hillside that fell away gently towards a gully at the bottom. Our land rose up a short distance beyond the gully before meeting the neighbour’s fence. On the eastern rise, excavations for the house, rainwater tank and garage had gouged gnarly clay batters into the hillside. Situated below the house stood a twenty-thousand-gallon tank shining industrial silver and ready to receive rainwater. And directly behind Greg was the temporary home he’d spent all summer erecting – candy pink bathroom, yellow-ochre caravans and a double garage. The whole building site looked ghastly, made worse by the colour choices I had applied to the bathroom and caravans. I had to conjure an image of the site’s future magnificence just to look at it.

I joined Greg on the house pad. ‘You’ve arrived.’

‘I had things to do.’

‘The footings have to be four-hundred-millimetre square,’ he said in his typically dour way. He’d felt daunted by the build from day one.

‘Okay.’

‘Dug to a depth of two-hundred millimetres.’

‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘And there are one-hundred-and-five of them.’

He thrust his spade into the line he’d scored. It went in about an inch.

‘It was never going to be easy,’ I said. ‘Where should I start?’

‘Anywhere you like.’

He’d begun in the hardest corner, where the excavator had exposed a sub-soil of decomposing granite. I started work on a footing nearby. I scored a perimeter line then rammed my spade into the ground. It made a barely visible dent. I chipped, levered and scraped the beginnings of a hole. I’d made a slightly more visible dent.

‘I think I need help,’ I said.

Greg peered over at me through his balaclava and grabbed his crow bar.

‘Stand back.’

He pounded the ground, sending a flurry of dust and tiny fragments into my face. I blinked and shook my head.

‘Stand further back,’ he said.

I obeyed and he continued pounding.

‘That should do you,’ he said and walked back to his hole.

I trowelled out the debris. The hole was now ten centimetres deep.

‘At least they can’t get any harder,’ I said, trying to sound encouraging.

‘They won’t get much easier either.’

The day warmed. Back on my feet with the spade, then on my knees with my trowel. Spade, crow bar, trowel; spade, crow bar, trowel. Four holes partially dug and it was lunchtime. We perched on the slabs of broken concrete and ate cheese sandwiches, staring blankly at the site.

By dusk we’d managed ten holes.

Two weeks and five cubic metres of concrete later, we stared at one hundred and five concrete pads, those on the perimeter with steel straps sprouting from their centres. I was hardly to know it then, that I would be staring at those concrete pads for another six months.

I’d moved into Greg’s old and rundown cottage three years earlier with my eleven-year-old daughters, Sarah and Mary, and our tortoiseshell cat, Pickles. Greg had already transformed his half-acre garden from a rough patch of overgrown lawn into a series of terraces edged with massive granite boulders and broken concrete. But the cottage was sinking into the ground on its hundred-year-old, rotting red-gum stumps. Storm water silting from the dirt road above had buried sections of sub-floor. The roof leaked, windows hung crookedly, and the closed-in verandas were in serious disrepair.

It wasn’t long before we re-stumped. We shovelled out from under the house barrows and barrows full of soil. We used the soil to top-dress the lawn, increasing the level of the whole block about ten centimetres. Greg raised the bearers on car jacks and removed the stumps one by one. I dug the footings to a depth of a metre or more using a handle-less shovel and a trowel. I enjoyed the work. It was a much-needed break from the doctoral thesis I’d started shortly after my return to Cobargo.

I was researching the interplay between literal and metaphoric interpretations of esoteric texts, focusing on the teachings of Theosophist Alice A. Bailey. I had three years to prove my point. Three years paid by the government. Handsomely too. By the same government that refused to recognize my teaching qualification from the UK which meant I could not teach in state schools in Australia unless I retrained. After leaving the highwater mark of the Ghana Link, I wasn’t about to do that.

When I returned to my studies Greg demolished walls and re-laid floors all around me. He poured enormous creative energy into the renovations. He put his heart into every stick of timber, his thought in every fine detail, from the original red gum wall studs to the original stringy-bark floorboards. We bought more floorboards recycled from an abandoned shearing shed in the Snowy Mountains, framing timber from another old high-country building, and one massively long four by two from Cobargo’s old Butter Factory.

My thesis progressed in parallel with the renovations. I puzzled ideas while Greg puzzled room designs. When I re-structured chapters Greg was moving interior walls. And when my supervisor told me to add a meta-theory, something to hang all my ideas from and hold the whole lot together, Greg re-roofed. Whatever I did in my thesis, Greg was doing something similar with the building. It felt magical. But as both projects neared completion I began to worry about the future. My doctorate looked set to lead nowhere, the topic too obscure, my approach uncomfortably radical and academic postings in the field few. We’d been living off my scholarship so that Greg could focus on the renovations. But that would run out next February. Nine short months away. What next? – Unemployment benefits? Greg wasn’t bothered. He had a take-it-as-it-comes approach to life. But I was bothered. I needed another project, something to justify leaving behind the Ghana link, something to justify staying in Cobargo.

I came up with the idea, not exactly a tree-change, more a tree side-step, during a mid-winter walk around Cobargo’s former golf course.

The evening was still. Leaving the cottage unlocked, we walked through the wisteria-laden lichgate and joined a track near the sports ground’s toilet block. The track, a mown strip, coursed up the hill to the north, zigzagging round the disused fairways and greens. I wanted a brisk walk but Greg felt like a stroll. He liked to observe the minutiae of life.

Five minutes into our walk I heard, ‘Isobel. Look. Isn’t it pretty.’

I halted my stride and turned back. He was on his haunches looking into the pasture.

‘Come closer. It’s exquisite.’

I bent down beside him. He pointed at a tiny star-like flower nestling among native grasses, six milky-white petals splayed open to reveal a bright-yellow centre.

‘See the purple halo radiating little lines up the spine of each petal?’ he said.

I peered closer. It was so delicate, not showy like many cultivated flowers, and it was so small someone like me would tread on it on their way past.

I hadn’t managed more than ten paces before Greg stopped me again. This time he’d spotted a wedge-tail eagle circling in the sky high above us. Before long a pair of mud-larks chased away the eagle with an angry flurry of wing-flapping and high-pitched cries.

‘That’s pee wee for eagle,’ Greg said.

We headed towards the cemetery, crossing the rickety wooden bridge littered with overgrown brambles growing in the creek below and following the rise to the crest. This was my favourite part of the walk. The path turns sharply west, affording an admirable view of Cobargo snuggling in the hills that undulate to the western ranges. A view to quiet the heart.

I threw my arms out wide. ‘I could never leave this place. It’s so gorgeous.’

‘And Cobargo’s the perfect size,’ Greg said. ‘That’s what makes this view so charming – Cobargo’.

I glanced across the highway. Fenced in the shape of a pointed boot was the land my mother used to entice me to leave England. Then the land belonged to her. Now I owned half of it. She was keen to sell me the other half.

I turned to catch Greg’s eye. ‘I’d love to buy out my mother’s share of the land.’

‘Do it.’

‘And build.’

He hesitated. ‘To do that we’d have to sell the cottage.’

‘I know. But just imagine how self-sufficient we could be with all that land.’

‘Build a whole house?’ He frowned. ‘I’m not sure I’d want to take that on. Renovating is enough building for me.’

‘But everyone says that building is easier and quicker than renovating. Just think – new materials. No de-nailing. No sanding off old paint.’

‘I don’t think I can do it. It’s a question of scale.’

‘Of course you can. Look what you’ve done with the renovations.’

‘Isobel, you’ve used the wrong tense. I’m still renovating.’

‘Not for much longer.’

Greg sighed. He turned his back to me and gazed at the sunset. I persisted.

‘And I’ll have finished my thesis. I can be of more help.’

He stood beside a small-framed light-weight woman who couldn’t fork the ground without hurting her back and was prone to muscle spasms that left her prostrate on the sofa for days. But I was determined. I looked past Cobargo at the mountains. Dumpling Ridge was bathed in a soft back-light, silhouetted against the blue-grey of the ranges behind. Stunning, but a view wasn’t enough to base a major life decision on. I had to find other ways to persuade Greg.

‘Look, we don’t want to live in a city, but there’s no work for us around here. We have to do something.’

‘That something, as you put it, will turn up.’

‘Will it? We could make the land work for us instead. Think of all the fruit and vegetables we could grow. And we’d have chickens, maybe goats or sheep. And olives, avocados and almonds. All that food!’

‘Won’t pay the bills, Isobel.’

‘We could try out cash crops for that.’

Greg paused. ‘We could provide guest accommodation.’

‘Run a bed and breakfast?’

He’d mentioned this before. Becoming a guesthouse proprietor held no appeal. All that cleaning, bed-changing, washing and cooking. I’d feel like a lackey. But we did live in a tourist area. And it was a way of introducing strangers to a different lifestyle. If that’s what it would take to convince Greg, then I’d do it.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’ Greg turned to face me. ‘Are you sure?’

‘That way we might have enough to fulfil our needs.’

Enough for us would not be very much at all. Others might see themselves as battlers in spite of owning a four-wheel drive and a swimming pool. We were different. We had humble aspirations and simple needs. We loved buying things second-hand. We made things, fixed things and did without things. Our leisure time was spent in the garden. We were the antithesis of consumerism; we were preservers. I preserved food and Greg preserved everything he could lay his hands on – timber, fence posts, furniture, old tools, bits of wire, and anything in the garden. Give Greg a junk pile and he’d turn it, in time, to myriad uses.

Heading for home, the idea quickly became a vision. We imagined our cottage garden and multiplied it by ten. Individual trees became orchards, an average-sized vegetable garden, a series of sweeping terraces. As our walk neared its end we dreamt up a castle with all of its grounds complete, and then we decided to give it a name.

Thinking of the phones, faxes and modems struck by lightning around here I came up with Lightning Ridge.

‘Who on earth would book into a guest house with a name like that.’

‘Dun’ roamin’,’ I said, thinking of my own nomadic life. ‘Greg’s Nest?’

We both laughed at that.

‘It has to be a name that reflects what we are trying to achieve,’ Greg said.

‘One that speaks of the garden and the views then.’

‘And one that captures our beliefs.’

‘You remember how we were going to erect little plaques in our garden, like Schopenhauer’s Shed and Descartes’ Dog House? We should think of something along those lines.’

‘Nietzsche’s Nook, err, Hegel’s Heaven.’

‘Hume’s Hovel.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What about Voltaire’s Garden?’

‘Did he have a garden?’

‘Voltaire? No idea.’

I discovered soon after that Voltaire did have a garden. Later in his life when he went into exile, first at Les Délices, a property he rented near Geneva, and then at Ferney, just below the French Alps. He was a lover of fresh produce. He grew herbs. Voltaire’s garden had lavender, rue and hyssop, basil, sage and salad burnet, and rosemary, tarragon and thyme. All the herbs that were growing in our garden.

I knew we could never match Voltaire’s garden in scale. He was an exceptionally wealthy man with considerable acreage. All we could hope to create would be a rustic, do-it-yourself version, not quite the formal chateau resplendent with exquisite gardens filled with topiary and statues. But gardens, no matter their size, are places where human needs and nature meet in creative and co-operative union, a point of mediation between civilisation and wilderness. Voltaire valued not just the physicality of a garden; he saw it as a valuable metaphor for how to live a life.

As I made these discoveries, one frivolous moment opened into something profound. From that moment I became captivated with Voltaire’s philosophy.

The following morning, I awoke buzzing with excitement. I made a pot of coffee and found pens and scrap paper to make lists. I was determined to make Voltaire’s Garden a reality. I was inflamed again, convinced I’d found the ultimate solution for us, one capable of eclipsing my recent past, making sense of our lives and doing some good in the world.

I knew I’d make it happen.