01/07/2024
I recently entered the Lord Mayor's Literary Award with submissions into two categories. This is one of my submissions.
PS #1: I have previously posted this story, but before submission, I rewrote it.
PS #2: It is NOT a quick read!
Snippets of a Vet's Life - Lady Vestey's Clock.
I remember only having two phone calls with her.
The second was near the end of my tenure in the Green Cottage.
I returned from tending to a horse with colic, and I went to turn into my parking spot outside the set of big green gates that guarded the exit of her property.
A Chanel Nine “Sixty Minutes” van blocked me.
There had been a recent anniversary of the “Wave Hill Walk Off” where, in August 1966, a strike by Indigenous workers for better conditions was considered an important influence on Aboriginal land rights in Australia.
The Vestey Group owned Wave Hill Station at the time of the workers’ strike, hence Sixty Minutes’ interest in Lady Vestey.
I parked, got out, and looked through the slats in the green wooden gates.
Inside was a small group of men and a camera facing towards the big house in the distance.
Her house.
The men should not have been inside the gates.
With their telephoto lens, they could look into her house, her home, and as I was to learn, her refuge.
I went inside and called her phone number.
"Yes?', she said, with her quiet, hesitant voice.
"I apologise for calling Lady Vestey, but you should know that a television camera, with a big lens, is aimed at the back of your house. They are from the television current news program, “Sixty Minutes."
"Oh!” And I could hear her take a short intake of air. “Thank you."
Click.
The first phone call was about 10 years earlier, in January 1976.
In my first year in practice, I worked as a young veterinarian in Lilydale, in the near country northeast of Melbourne.
I met Lady Vestey one day when she arrived with her dog for its annual check-up and vaccination.
I had started with the practice about two weeks earlier, and I was sleeping on a camp stretcher in the dog/kennel room.
Occasionally, a dog patient would have to stay over, and they would sometimes bark all night.
To this day, I do not understand why I did not rent a flat in Lilydale, except I suspect that I was probably short of funds, as are many graduating vets.
And also I had a horse.
After one very disturbed night, sleeping in the dog room, I got the courage up and rang Lady Vestey. On many trips along the Maroondah Highway to Healesville, I noticed a derelict wooden cottage with a green roof. It stood beside a green hedge and behind a ramshackle green palings fence. Next door was a set of large wooden green gates.
It was called the Green Cottage.
I realised it was part of the Coombe Cottage Estate, and Lady Vestey lived there.
I rang her and asked if I could rent the cottage.
Her answer was a short "No."
We spoke for a few more minutes, and finally, she said,
"If you like I will meet you at the cottage tomorrow at 10.00 am and show you why I can't rent the cottage. Goodbye."
Click
One of my strengths is research.
I can go to the nth degree to nail a project.
The few days before I made that first phone call, I read "Melba" by John Heatherton.
Melba was an early Australian opera singer who created Coombe Cottage at Coldstream as a place where she could relax.
And Lady Vestey was Melba's granddaughter and now lived in Coombe Cottage.
She had settled there later in her life, and as she told me one Christmas, over drinks at Coombe, "I have lived my whole life in other people's mansions, but this is my first home."
Melba was probably one of the first "International" Australian stars.
She was much more than an opera star. She was a "character" and was fêted by many rich and powerful people in London and the great Opera cities of Europe.
Melba was the daughter of a Hawthorn businessman who, amongst other things, owned a quarry in Lilydale.
Towards the end of her International career, Melba bought a Cottage in Coldstream.
It was to be a place for her to spend her latter years.
At some point, she had rebuilt it and renamed it Coombe Cottage.
Melba had a son, and her son had a daughter called Pamela.
Later, Pamela was to marry an English man, Lord Vestey, who later died in WW2, and Pamela then became known as Pamela, Lady Vestey.
She never remarried.
Melba and her only granddaughter, Pamela, were very close, and on one trip to London, Melba took her granddaughter for a walk.
Their journey took them into Grosvenor Square, and many greeted Melba as they walked along the street.
Melba was the centre of attention, but she introduced her granddaughter to a few people they met on the walk.
One, in particular, was an old lady, but as I waited for Lady Vestey, I knew nothing of this.
I had an appointment at 10:00 a.m. to meet her at the Green Cottage, so I ensured I was on time.
I had breakfast at the local Coldstream Road House.
It started a habit of going out for breakfast that stayed with me until I married 15 years later.
I drove out of Coldstream toward the big house, Coombe Cottage, guarding the intersection of the Yarra Glen and Healesville roads.
I continued right towards Healesville, following the long sweep of the Maroondah Highway that formed the boundary of her estate.
I parked on the verge and opened the front gate to what was called “The Green Cottage”.
In front was an unkempt pivot hedge, broken by a gate on the right.
A tall hedge separated the confines of the cottage and the adjacent pasture.
Behind the cottage was a row of tall trees, and beyond and to the left, across a low valley, was the kitchen garden and the back hedge of Coombe Cottage.
The exterior walls of the single-story wooden cottage were painted green around the bottom, and above the level of the windows, the walls were a dirty yellow.
The iron roof was a dark green, and the gutters needed repair.
At the front, extending around the left side, and at the back was a verandah with a wooden slated floor.
Over the parts of the verandah, and on the left side, was an overgrown garden of shrubs and the occasional flower.
And around the cottage was an unkept lawn, much of it burnt by the recent summer heat.
A car was parked out the front.
I attempted to open the gate, but it needed a good push. It opened with a sudden “give” and a distinctive sound from the bottom scraping along the concrete path.
She stood at the far end of the verandah, and I joined her.
She turned right, and we walked towards the back door.
A rusted water tank stood on a platform, held up by four stilts, and this structure was to the left of the door.
The sounds of the front gate were to become memories, and so, too, was the sound of the key in the back door.
Clunk, followed by a rattle, and then a heave-ho to the door as it opened. I followed her in.
“Well, my young friend, this is why I can't rent you the cottage. It is derelict, and nobody has lived in it for many years.”
We stood in the kitchen, and I could see the adjacent paddocks through the two opposite windows.
To the left of the fireplace was an obvious hole in the wooden floor about the size of a large saucepan.
To the right of the fireplace was a doorway.
“You can try that, but I don’t think the door has been opened for years. It is the entrance to the sitting room and the front bedrooms..”
I tried the handle. It turned, but time and the collapse of the foundations had distorted the frame, and I could not open the door. It was firmly wedged shut. I wouldn’t gain entry to the sitting room for another few weeks, and only after I had used a car jack to raise the house onto new foundations.
“This is perfect,” I said. “It is much better than the dog kennel room where I sleep.”
She went silent and said, “Well, I guess you could stay here if you think it is alright. It is uninhabitable, but if you wish, I could see how it goes. But there are two requirements that I want you to follow.”
“Yes?”
“The first is that you respect my privacy, and the second is that you never ring me.”
I quietly considered her conditions and then responded,
“Thank you. I have no trouble agreeing to your conditions, and I am sure you will have no trouble with me.”
“Didn’t you say that you had a horse?”
“Yes.”
Pointing out the far kitchen window, “You can use that 5-acre paddock next door.”
That night, I exchanged sleeping in the clinic dog room for sleeping in the kitchen of the derelict Green Cottage.
When I arrived at work the following day, there was an envelope with my name handwritten.
“Dear Sir,
I have checked with the Trustee's Executor, who told me that, for legal reasons, I need to charge you rent. To that end, would asking for a peppercorn a year be too much?
Pamela Vestey”
What luck, I thought.
She had given me a great gift.
Years later, I realised how much this arrangement was to “cost” me.
Her letter was the first of many between us, most of which have sadly been lost.
But not all.
One is now attached to the back of a lithograph print dated 1886 that I had purchased, by chance, in Hawthorn and hung on the Green Cottage’s sitting room wall.
In the print, two people are sitting on their horses.
One, a man dressed for the Hunt in crimson, sat astride his brown hunter and confidently looked towards the viewer.
And alongside him, riding sidesaddle, and with her gaze turned forward, sat a woman dressed also for the Hunt.
Behind them, in the near distance, was a grand house, and in front of them, surrounded by Fox Hounds, was a man in a red jacket on foot. Perhaps he was a Hunt servant, for his attention was on the Hounds around him.
One afternoon, Lady Vestey visited me because she needed assistance with her chickens, and I offered her a cup of tea.
She sat down and started to sip the tea when she suddenly put her cup down and uttered an exclamation. I looked up and saw that she was staring at "The Heythorp Hunt,” the title of the print that I had recently purchased and hung on the sitting room wall.
She put her cup down and stood up.
"I’m sorry. I have to leave," she said and rushed out.
I looked at the print.
Had something in my print unsettled her.?
A few days passed, and I received a letter from her.
When I read her letter, I discovered that she was unsettled by the identity of the lady sitting sidesaddle on her hunter and the house in the background.
I have often been amazed by the effect of " chance " on our lives.
What was revealed in Lady Vestey’s letter was yet another example of how the threads that form the patchwork of our life gradually come together.
She wrote,
“Today, I saw two figures in a print of the “Heythrop Hunt.” It became compulsive to find out who they were. . .”
She had consulted Debrett’s Peerage and identified Albert Brassey, Master of the Heyrrhrop, and his wife, the Hon Matilda. She was also to learn that their London address was 29 Berkeley Square.
This bit of information explained her sudden reaction and her sudden exit without drinking her tea.
“The address. . .stirred some memory. It was the last private house in Berkeley Square. I remember going there with my Grandmother” (i.e., Melba), “ to visit one of her closest friends. My memory of her face is blurred, but I knew that she was a lady of great character.”
She added that, as a little snippet,
“. . .and during WW2, her grandson married one of my school friends. . .”
Debrett also gave the Master and his wife’s country address: Heythrop, Chipping Norton.
In a subsequent letter, now lost, Lady Vestey added that she had lived on the adjacent estate when she was newly married and added that the house in the print background was now a monastery.
I can only imagine the shock that the print had caused her.
A print that I had purchased in Hawthorn, Melbourne, by chance, should end up hanging on a wall in the Green Cottage.
It had jolted her back to the mid-1920s, to a walk with her much-loved grandmother and a long-forgotten encounter with an old lady who lived in Berkeley Square.
As Lady Vestey explained, the young lady in the print was the same old lady she met one day with her grandmother on an afternoon walk in Berkeley Square.
And so explained her sudden departure that afternoon.
But as I was to learn, her behaviour of a sudden, unexplained exit was not that unusual.
She did the same thing after opening and reading my first letter to her.
,
I had written it not long after moving into the Green Cottage.
She was in the Coldstream post office and, after reading it, exclaimed to the postmistress,
“Oh, dear. The poor boy has lost his mind in that Cottage!”
She reread it and then, without another word, turned and left the post office.
Later, the postmistress told me of this encounter and commented,
“That must have been an interesting letter.”
It was a simple letter about the chiming of bells, and I had spent 4 hours writing it during the early hours of one morning a few days earlier.
Within the first two weeks of residence at the Green Cottage, I was underneath, and with a few bricks and a car jack, I could lift the foundations of the door adjacent to the fireplace and gain entry to the fireplace sitting room.
The door into the front hallway and bedrooms was still jammed shut, so I slept in the sitting room for the next few months.
I have always had trouble getting to sleep. Now, I simply get out of bed, read a book for 15 minutes, and then go back to bed, which will often solve the problem.
But I had not learned this trick at this stage in my life, and on this particular night, I found that I was still wide awake and restless at about 3:00 am.
I heard a bell chime. I counted. There was a second chime. I waited. And waited. There were no more chimes.
I eventually went to sleep.
The next night, I was revisited by restlessness.
Again, I heard a chime. I waited. Then, another chime. I waited. But there were no more chimes.
I looked at my clock. Again, it was about 3:00 am.
I lay there for a while, still wide awake, and wondered about the chimes.
Two chimes for 3:00 am. It troubled me.
By this stage, I knew that there was a bell tower above the old stable block to the side of Coombe Cottage. The hourly tolling of the bell was coming from this bell tower.
I waited until 4:00 am and heard three bell rings. There was a problem.
Part of my agreement with Lady Vestey was never to ring her, but there was no prohibition on writing her a letter.
I rolled out of bed, sat at my desk, and, over the next few hours, wrote the following letter,
"Dear Lady Vestey
As Winter beckons Spring, itself an invitation to Summer, my thoughts briefly dwell upon this changing masterpiece.
And I have concluded that She, the one we call Nature, relies most heavily upon those changing chimes that Coombe hourly chants.
But Alas!
This year, Winter will not know when to end or Spring to descend since those chimes from that clock aren’t quite what they ought to be.
Your Tenant"
And I posted it to her later that day.
I have already described Lady Vestey’s behaviour when she first read my letter in the Coldstream post office.
She abruptly left and later arranged for the clock in the Stable block at Coombe to be fixed.
About a week after my letter, I received a letter from her, hand-delivered to the Vet Clinic before I arrived for work.
Dear Sir,
Hark.
Listen and hear!
Two and two again do meet in the Night and in the Morn.
Vestey.
And so started a correspondence that ebbed and flowed over the next ten years.
Her letters to me have sadly been lost.
Mine to her were probably dispatched to the waste bin.
One letter, again lost, has been preserved in my memory.
It was to be her final letter to me.
After I read it, I was overcome with a sense of. . relief.
“Dear Sir,
I find that I now have a need for the Green Cottage.
Could you please let me know by what date you can vacate?
Pamela Vestey”
The relief came from the feeling that I could finally give up the Cottage.
As I have come to experience it, there is nothing so costly as something “free”.
By this stage in their lives, many of my friends were homeowners and had established families.
They probably had mortgages, and as I have found, there is nothing more encouraging than debt.
My rent was a peppercorn a year, and I was in arrears.
There was no impulse for me to get on and establish myself financially.
Life was easy.
But I did feel that I was wandering through life without a sense of purpose.
Her letter had, in a way, “released” me.
Two weeks after I left, the Green Cottage was abruptly demolished.
Later, the adjacent large green gates that had guarded the back entrance to the long internal driveway to the big house were removed and replaced with a simple wire fence.
In time, all evidence of the existence of the Green Cottage simply disappeared.
I was greatly saddened and shocked, but it was her cottage, and she could do with it as she wished.
Twenty years later, I was having dinner with some friends when, by chance, I learned the reason for my sudden eviction and why the cottage was then demolished.
It involved the Australian Ballet and a real estate agent called Tim...
“Are you sure it was the Australian Ballet?”
“Yes”
We were in a city restaurant having a late-night dinner.
Our friend had asked us to join her and her new male friend for dinner. It was the start of a new relationship for her, and I think we were there for “support.”
His name was Tim, and he told us he was a real estate agent.
It was one of those “getting to know you” dinners, and somehow, the conversion had turned to me and what I did.
Questions like these are relaxing for men. They are comfortable talking about themselves and what they do.
Somebody had mentioned that I lived in the Yarra Valley, in an old cottage on the Nellie Melba Estate.
“ I used to do some work out there ages ago,” he responded.
I added that I had been a Horse Vet and had a three-person practice that operated successfully, even though it was in debt.
Tim quite naturally asked how it was that I was now a small animal Vet in inner Melbourne.
“I got married,” I said and added that even though I had built a house on ten acres in Coldstream and that the builders had finished the week we got married and that we had bought furniture together and planted the garden together, and had purchased ponies for the children, together, there had been a lack of communication between myself and my new wife, and that is the short version of how I came to be living in inner Melbourne..
“You may not believe this, but it was me who got you evicted from the Green Cottage.”
"Well," I said, looking straight at him, "Please tell me. More."
And as he did, I remembered a conversation from many years earlier...
Ken Kneebone was the proprietor of the local garage in Coldstream, and Ken’s wife, Beth, was the daughter of a previous head gardener at Coombe Cottage, and the head gardener and his family had lived in the Green Cottage years before I had lived there.
Through many conversations with Ken, I concluded that Ken often “knew things” before others “knew things.”
One day, as I was paying for petrol, he happened to say,
“I hear you’re leaving.”
“What do you mean, Ken?’
“She was in here the other day wondering how to get rid of you.”
Ken could be straightforward sometimes.
“Oh,” I said. “Have I done something to upset her?”
“No”
“What then?”
“Can’t say.”
“Thanks, Ken.”
Two days later, I received a note from Lady Vestey requesting that I give up the Green Cottage.
Ken knew why I was asked to leave, but he would never discuss it.
I couldn’t get it out of him.
It remained a mystery, and in time, I forgot about it.
Twenty years later, Tim’s comment had retriggered the memory of Ken’s conversation, forewarning all those years earlier.
“Are you sure it was the Australian Ballet? If it were the Australian Opera, it would make sense, but the Ballet. . . .”
“Sure. She had a disagreement with the Australian Opera, something to do with Melba’s legacy, and she was going to leave Coombe Cottage to the Ballet.”
Tim explained that he had been asked for his real estate advice in a meeting with Lady Vestey and then added what he had told her.
“Lady Vestey, there is one slight problem with you handing control to the Australian Ballet. It’s that fellow living in the Green Cottage. If he doesn’t want to leave, it could take you years to get him out.”
“I don’t think he will be a problem,” she apparently replied.
And I wasn’t.
I moved out shortly after receiving her letter requesting I vacate the Green Cottage.
Tim had solved a mystery that had stayed with me since I received her letter.
His information also explained why the Green Cottage was demolished not long after I had vacated it. The demolition was to prevent squatters from taking up residence and thwarting her plans.
It is now history that Lady Vestey retained control of Coombe Cottage until her death on September 7, 2011, and that her heirs have converted the stable block and old garage into a restaurant and reception centre.
Some years earlier, I saw Lady Vestey at a charity film night in Healesville. It was to be the last time.
I was there with my wife. We had travelled from Melbourne, and I was excited to see my old friends from my Yarra Valley days.
I saw her. She was standing in a small group of older people.
She was frail.
I approached and introduced my wife.
She hesitantly smiled out of politeness. I could see that she was confused. She didn’t seem to understand what I was doing or who I was.
“Lady Vestey. It’s your tenant. Do you remember me? The Vet?”
There was no recognition.
“I used to live in the Green Cottage, and we used to talk about your chickens and discussed the old lady in the print one day. . . .
And I wrote to you about the bell chimes...
And you wrote back. Do you remember?.”
She looked at me with an untrusting stare. I could see that there was no memory of me.
She looked bewildered, perhaps distressed, and quietly said, “I don’t know you.”
And then, as if she was troubled by somebody’s presence, she excused herself, looked away, and then walked away.
On the way home later that night, we drove past where the Green Cottage had once stood, and it was as though none of what I had related had ever happened.
The side hedge had gone.
The tall back trees had gone.
The Big Green Gates were gone,
The squeaky front gate had gone.
The Green Cottage had been demolished, and the land returned to the pastures from whence it had come.
All had gone.
Except. . .my memories, this story, and a hand-coloured print called “The Heythorp Hunt.”
