Gentle Annie

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

I’d never heard of Gentle Annie till my father talked of her. I thought he might have been referring to a distant relative, a cousin maybe who had died young but lived on in family memory. Gentle Annie, as it turned out, was not a person but a place. My grandmother said Gentle Annie was a song.

‘Thou wilt come no more, gentle Annie …’

My grandmother didn’t need much encouragement to sing. She once had a beautiful voice my mother told me, but all I heard were creaking notes. I hoped this place called gentle Annie was better than my grandmother’s song.

To clear up any further confusion my mother said that Gentle Annie was the place they had decided to spend that year’s holiday. It helped, she said, looking at my grandmother, that Gentle Annie had a musical sound befitting its name. I wasn’t sure but a holiday, even at a place called gentle Annie was a good thing.

A holiday in those long-ago times was camping out in a tent. Later we had two – one for us men and the other for the women. It was what my parents could afford for their annual leave. I don’t know what they thought of it but each year I anticipated a romp. I expect my mother would have preferred her own bed or at least some creature comforts but to me camping, even if it was with my family, was good fun.

All camping grounds were much alike in those days. Their shower and toilet blocks were not as clean or sweet smelling as our bathroom at home, but nor were they primitive. My brother and I overlooked such things in the name of adventure. My father said nothing about them. He’d been a prisoner-of-war and had put up with worse. What my mother and sister thought, I never asked.

Deep, dreamless sleep was the natural end of a day spent exploring, fishing and the like. At night we had a campfire and my father told us stories about how he’d lived off the land when he was a young man. The closest we ever to that was cooking the fish he told my mother he’d caught that day. We never let on that more than once, when the fish weren’t biting, he’d duck into a fish and chip shop to buy whatever was left in their fridge. I’m sure my mother got into the spirit of things and pretended to believe him.

Gentle Annie was, and is, a hill. I felt the beauty of the name as I heard my father say it. As we approached it for the first time, I saw it on the map I held. My father let me believe I was the navigator on our trip down along the Ocean Road. On the return, it was my brother who took charge of the map.

My father manoeuvred our old Austin A40 along the winding dusty track outside of Apollo Bay taking us to our rendezvous with a farmer who had rented out parts of his farm to the tourists who flocked to the coast for the January break. This year had marked a major break with the past because there wasn’t even the luxury of a real camping ground with its shower and toilet blocks. ‘We’ll live off the land, wash in the creek and dig a latrine,’ my father told us as we planned the trip. Just why my parents broke with their long-standing tradition and how my father talked my mother into rough camping so far from civilisation I never discovered.

So Gentle Annie it was.

The creek we were going to wash in and provide us with drinking water was a pretty watercourse flowing out of the hills and lined in the gullies with ferns and darkness. We camped on a flat area about a quarter mile or so from the farmhouse. ‘It’s a flood plain in winter,’ my father added for our information.

The farm may have been a way up one of the valleys in the area but on quiet evenings, I could still hear the distant roar of the surf. Once or twice on a warm night, my father took my brother and I hiking up Gentle Annie’s slopes. We’d find some place to sit near the summit and in the early hours of the morning when it was still and crystal-clear, we could see low on the distant horizon the Aurora Australis pirouetting beyond where sky and sea became as one in the folds of the southern darkness. In those moments, staring in wonderment at the faint colours, I came to believe I could see the face of God and Gentle Annie was His cathedral. It was the closest to Heaven I ever came.

The moment I first stepped from the car I knew Gentle Annie and I were destined for a love affair. The more we talked about our holiday, the more her name conjured all things bucolic before I even knew the meaning of that word. After a three-to-four-hour drive, I wondered at the scenery of sloping green paddocks that crawled upwards only to be swallowed by a forest from which rose an escarpment that appeared to nudge the clouds. A distance away I could see an actual waterfall leaping through a rainbow and into the forest below it. A waterfall in the middle of summer! Did life get any better than that? The residual wetness of recent rains accentuated the greenness of the place. In the paddocks there were cows and sheep drawn onto a landscape that screamed the promise of adventure, hide-and-seek and play to a city lad aching for escape. I’d seen on the map in the car that somewhere on the other side of Apollo Bay there was a place called Paradise. Looking at Gentle Annie, I knew this was a lie. Paradise was Gentle Annie.

I’d read somewhere that nature was red in tooth and claw, but Annie was well-named. She was as gentle as the colours of the sea, sky and leafy trees and ferns. In that early part of summer her greenery was a fading velvet. Later, as the weather warmed and rain became a memory, she tired to the point of exhaustion in the relentlessness of the Australian sun.

As the weeks passed the waterfall dried to a trickle before stopping altogether. Her flanks browned like the sunbathers on the beach at the end of the track where creek and sea kissed. No matter the heat or the warm winds that blew down the valley, Annie retained a genteel whisper of green. It was her promise of a new year hidden beneath her tanned skirts.

Those summer days passed in a blur but are as clear to me as if they were yesterday.

After some six or so weeks we packed up and left. My heart lurched as I looked through the rear window of the car. I raised a hand to wave goodbye to Gentle Annie as she faded back into the hills. We bumped back down the track to the Ocean Road and the stream of traffic that would lead us back to a place we called home.

Home.

I didn’t want to go there. Home had become the slopes of Gentle Annie. She was my surrogate, my summer, mother. I loved her. I think I cried as we turned a bend and she disappeared. I remember my real mother hugging me and saying that Annie had been waiting thousands of years for us. She would wait one more.

When I got home I looked up the song that my grandmother loved so much. I’d never heard of Stephen Foster but she and I spent the time between then and the following Christmas holidays singing the ode to my new love.

‘Thou wilt come no more, gentle Annie
Like the flower
Who’s spirit did depart
Who has come and gone like the many
Who have bloomed in the springtime of my heart.’

It wasn’t all that accurate but what did I care? As far as I was concerned, this was a song about Gentle Annie, and she had become a part of my life. I loved her in the unconditional way that only children can love.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.