When our three children were growing up, we had a cavalcade of house guests who stayed for a few days and sometimes longer. I invited all of them, despite the first one badly overstaying his welcome and Trish chasing me around the house with murderous intent saying “don’t you ever do that again!”
My motivation was always an entirely do-unto-others thing. When I heard about someone I knew who was arriving in Sydney and needed a place to stay for a while, I ‘d think “well, I know just how they’d be feeling. They’ll be in a strange city, know no one, and will jump at an offer of short term accommodation until they find their feet and get a suitable place.”
I remembered how lucky I’d felt staying with an aunt and uncle in London the first time I travelled overseas. I’ve stayed at friends homes in San Francisco, Edinburgh, Washington DC, Istanbul and Tokyo. Having locals guide you around, explain how things like the subway worked, finding cheap good restaurants and telling you about tourist traps to avoid is a godsend. And the opportunity to immerse yourself in the routines of a family who speak a different language is almost always unforgettable.
I often think of the people who hosted me, their sincere joy and pride in showing me around their cities and their ease in appearing disheveled at breakfast time in the kitchen making breakfast with someone they had only known from conferences and email chat. I thought that putting my hand up first to signal to new guests that we were the sort of people who liked this stuff ourselves, so we’ve got your back in a new city, was the right thing to do.
So how did it all work out?
Geoffreyopoulos from Greece
Our first guest was a very old friend, Geoffrey. He’s been a neighbour in the early 1970s, and had turned his back on the usual grinding trajectory of job promotions and left a career in civil engineering to become a peripatetic resident of whatever port his 35 foot yacht found him in. I’d stayed with him in Rhodes harbour and stayed on his boat for a week with Trish in Dominica in the Caribbean’s Windward Islands (see Volcanoes, tsunamis, storms and near-death experiences in the Caribbean at p74 here ). He was one of the greatest raconteurs I’d ever known. I always called him Geoffreyopoulos because he’d lived so long in the Greek Islands.
Geoffrey had a house in Paddington and lived on the rent it provided. Every five years or so he’d be back in Sydney to do repairs, get medical attention for things like his eyes and catch up with old friends. So one day there was a tap on the door, completely out of the blue and there stood my old friend with his dilapidated backback. Geoffrey had almost no possessions, picked up cast off clothes and shoes in recycling shops and had no taste for the baubles of success.
“Could I stay for a little while?” he asked. Of course, we said. Nothing so proprietarily bourgeoise as “and for how long might that be for” ever crossed our minds.
Looking back, I imagine we thought maybe a week or two. But he left for Europe after three months.
Geoffrey was what Trish calls “a real man”. He could fix anything that needed fixing, and knew where to get second had parts to avoid being gouged. So in the first few weeks he fixed some loose roofing and guttering and rehung some wonky doors and supervised buying us a second car, helping us avoid some money traps. He’d often come home with a bottle of wine that was from the very lowest shelf in a wine shop. He’d help with the washing up and run small errands when we were at work.
We had many dinners late into the night where his inexhaustible supply of amazing tales from the Baltic, to Ireland, sailing solo several times solo across the Atlantic, North Africa and the Caribbean enthralled all who were there.
He had a teenage daughter who also lived on a boat in Cornwall. Every Friday night at the same time, he would use our phone to call a phone booth near her boat. They would speak for at least an hour. Let me know the cost when the bill comes, he said.
On the week he was due to leave, he said he’d like to take us out to dinner. And pay. This would be something. We went to a wonderful Shanghai dumpling shop in Ashfield where the bill for the three of us was all of $30. At the end of the meal, he was embarrassed to say that he’d accidentally left his wallet at home. It can happen to anyone.
We covered it. On the day he left we arrived home from work to find a note explaining that he’d worked out he’d spent more than the $30 farewell dinner he owed us on some fittings for our roof. We shrugged it off. But then a month later, we got a phone bill which was off the charts. Many hundreds of dollars. But Geoffrey’s ship had sailed.
Xisca from Barcelona
A close colleague from Barcelona contacted me with a small favour. His longtime cleaning lady’s daughter Xisca was coming to Sydney as the jumping off point for an Australian working holiday. She was only 19 and had never travelled abroad. Her mum was worried that she might be all at sea here, having only schoolgirl English. Would it be possible that she might stay with us for a short time to find her feet? Could we give her some tips about getting casual work?
Sure. We’d just love to do that. So on the day of her arrival we opened the door to a petite, raven-haired pretty Spanish girl with a thick accent and a backpack. It would be remiss of me not to note that she also had very large breasts with unavoidable cleavage.
So our two sons, then aged 13 and 15 had their eyes popping out of their heads from the moment she came through the door. They would nearly knock each other over trying to get to her first to help with a question or advice on the Sydney night life they’d never experienced but were of course fully expert about.
Within days Xisca began arriving back home at 2am or later. One night we peered out the window and saw her get out of a top end black Mercedes convertible driven by a man of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance, as crime reports always like to phrase it.
This happened very regularly to the young woman we felt we’d been entrusted to chaperone by her anxious mother whom we’d never met. But was it any of our business? Did we want to start behaving like her mother and interrogating her about what she was going out late most nights? Should we ask her about the nice gentleman in the drug dealer type car who seemed to be seeing a lot of her? Nah, no. We suggested that she might like to find a nice share house.
Indira from India
Indira was a young researcher I knew from India. She was coming to Sydney to study. She stayed with us for over a month, sleeping on a mattress in the lounge room. She cooked wonderful Tamil food and was polite and friendly to a fault. But there was one problem. At that time, we had one bathroom including a toilet that needed to be used by two adults and three teenagers, plus Indira.
We quickly discovered that when she went into the bathroom, she rarely emerged for at least 30 minutes. We would hear the toilet flush, and we would hear the sound of the shower on the tiles. And then the shower would stop. There’d then be silence and then the shower would start up again. After the first time this happened, we explained that we all needed to use the bathroom in the morning before leaving the house, so would she mind being the last one to use it? This generally worked, but in lieu of a roll-call about whether everyone else had finished with the bathroom, there were often people missed who then had to wait for her bathroom marathons.
I and the two boys would go outside to fertilise the garden, but Trish and our daughter would be pacing up and down hoping she was nearly finished. No explanation was ever given. Did she have some body-oiling, washing and re-oiling ritual? Did she have major bowel problems she wanted to keep private? Was there some sort of silent prayer thing happening in there? We didn’t feel we could ask.
David from Canada
David was a younger colleague from Canada. I’d met him a few times at conferences overseas. He was coming to Sydney for a sabbatical and asked if he, his wife and an infant child could stay with us for a short while when they had a gap between rents. They did and they were lovely.
A few years later he emailed asking if he might stay a few nights. He was a huge fan of the US band Wilco and had bought tickets for two of their Australian gigs. Sure, no problem. On the first night he took a shower. Sydney was having water shortages and David apparently thought having a shower meant staying in there for weeks.
Trish kept on coming up to me saying “he’s STILL in there! What the fuck is he doing!” These observations rose in intensity until she could bear it no longer and went up to the bathroom door and said “David, sorry mate but we have serious water shortages in Sydney. We only have very quick showers here.”
He was suitably sheepish when he emerged, so Trish took the opportunity to ask him to please also turn the lights off in the house before he left for the day. We’d noticed lots of people regarded lights as a free good, kindly donated by the government. On the night he went to a Wilco concert, we heard him come in about midnight. About 2am Trish woke and said to me “Bloody David has left the lights on in the living room!!”. She got out of bed naked and went down there to turn them off. David was lying on the lounge reading and copped a full gawk at his tormentor.
Mary from Canada
An old Canadian colleague emailed to ask if we might look after her daughter who had recently graduated. Mary wanted to live in Sydney for a bit to see how she liked it and whether she might later enrol in the graduate medical degree at Sydney University where I was in the faculty. “No worries! Our place is used to visitors. We love it!”
So Mary arrived. She was chatty and vivacious, and again, our boys thought they had won the lottery. Like others before her, she stayed and stayed. And paid no rent or keep.
One day she came home from Bondi Beach with a tale of how a photographer had chosen her to pose in her bikini holding a surfboad. It was for some high-end fashion magazine and as payment, she would get a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes which we were all supposed to know were worth well over $1000. This seemed as likely as pigs flying. But it turned out to be totally true. She clopped around the house in her terribly expensive shoes, with the magazine duly being published with a rear view of Mary in a bum-floss string bikini bottom lasciviously caressing a surfboard. The boys snuck it to school to show their mates evidence of the debauched life they led at home.
Aunt Rose from the Isle of Wight
When my dad was in his 80s and sliding slowly into dementia, we decided it would be a nice idea to fly his slightly younger sister Rose out from England to stay for a few months. She lived in the Isle of Wight and had never been abroad, except to Calais and back for the day.
When she arrived, it was summer. We explained that our then only bathroom was being renovated and it would take several weeks before it was ready. We showed her how we had rigged up a hose to the kitchen water tap. The hose went out to the back garden where it hung over a tree branch, with the water falling from a showerhead. We’d all been enjoying hot water outdoor showers in the privacy of the back garden. The rest of the family would all remain in the front of the house, we assured her. “When you holiday in Bali, you pay extra for the luxury of a private garden shower”we told her.
But she went ashen, soon taking Trish aside and saying that she simply could not bring herself to shower like this. Or even think about it. So for the first month of her visit she moved in with my sister in a nearby suburb until out bathroom was complete.
We noticed that she enjoyed a sweet white wine with dinner. One night we went with my sister’s family and Rose to a local Vietnamese restaurant. My brother-in-law Paul was extremely attentive with topping up Rose’s glass. So much so, that she needed to be helped out of the restaurant and into the car afterwards. I doubt if she had ever drunk so much, even across a month. Back at the house, the room began spinning around and Trish had to sit for an hour mopping her forehead with a wet flannel, with a bucket beside the bed.
Her visit was wonderful for dad, He came over often from his nursing home and they would sit talking lucidly about their childhood and the war years before he immigrated to Australia. His long term memory was in fine shape. She came out again once before he died in 2000.
When we recount these and many other stories to friends, they often say “I really couldn’t do that.” For some the sanctity of a home is inviolate. While we groan when we retell some of these stories, the net effect was undeniably positive for the family. They have all been inveterate travelers themselves, all love food from all over the world and I think are all richer for the experience.
This week we are having a man from Timbuktu in Mali and now living in Canberra staying for the weekend. I met him at an African festival recently. We talked music and realised we are going to the same gig. Come and stay I said.
Simon Chapman AO 