{"id":101458,"date":"2023-11-30T02:11:58","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T02:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebritycovernews.com\/?p=101458"},"modified":"2023-11-30T02:11:58","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T02:11:58","slug":"the-boat-was-taking-on-water-and-there-was-i-falling-in-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebritycovernews.com\/lifestyle\/the-boat-was-taking-on-water-and-there-was-i-falling-in-love\/","title":{"rendered":"The boat was taking on water, and there was I, falling in love"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Anna Funder<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Credit: <\/span>Mark Conlan <\/cite><\/p>\n

Save articles for later<\/h3>\n

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.<\/p>\n

Recently, a dear friend spoke at her husband\u2019s 60th birthday party. \u201cMarriage is a crap shoot,\u201d she said, and then went on to celebrate her spouse in a way that was all the more powerful and loving for being so clear-eyed about the chancy nature of their happiness.<\/p>\n

Another friend, a single woman as wise as she is straightforward, approached me at a lunch gathering \u2013 I thought possibly to escape a deep-dive my husband and some others were having into the intricacies of urban planning challenges and affordable housing. But she said, \u201cHow did you find him?\u201d She looked into my eyes. \u201cI mean, how did you know?\u201d She wasn\u2019t talking about urban planning, but life \u2013 which can\u2019t really be planned, no matter how much we try. I didn\u2019t know what to say. How to take credit for a crap shoot?<\/p>\n

But there was a moment I knew. It was New Year\u2019s Eve, 1990. Craig had invited about 35 friends onto his family\u2019s old wooden boat on Lake Eildon \u2013 an antipodean African Queen called Falcon, a boat he\u2019d lovingly restored. I was just one of the crowd of university student friends, pinching myself at the beauty of the old cruiser on a silky black lake, wondering what the new decade might bring.<\/p>\n

Lake Eildon is a man-made reservoir, where the water was flooded into valleys that had towns and trees in them, and now, ghost trees lurk dangerously under the surface at the edges. Stars were out, a whole hemisphere of them. The noise of our party carried across the water in every direction, the boat a blur of dancing bodies, held high on 50-year-old carvel-planked jarrah. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, The The, Concrete Blonde \u2013 music that is now indelibly romantic for me. But romance, like a beautiful lake, holds its own dangers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cHow to take credit for a crap shoot?\u201d asks Anna Funder.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Tim Bauer<\/cite><\/p>\n

Not long before midnight, I went to rest down the end of the boat, where Craig was. I overheard him say softly to his brother-in-law, \u201cWe\u2019re taking on water. I think we\u2019re sinking.\u201d I made myself invisible, kept listening. \u201cDon\u2019t say anything,\u201d Craig said to his horrified brother-in-law. \u201cI\u2019ll go have a look.\u201d He stripped down to his bathers and slipped quietly into the black water, full of the sharp, dead branches he imagined to have torn a hole in the hull.<\/p>\n

On the top deck, dozens of people laughed, drank, danced. Craig disappeared into darkness, holding his breath, swimming blind under the hull from side to side, feeling it for holes. He came up gasping, again and again, each time a hand\u2019s breadth further along. Forty-six feet, I imagined, never seemed so huge a span.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrap shoot\u201d comes from a game called \u201ccraps\u201d, which involves betting on the outcome of a roll of the dice; it\u2019s something, Google says, \u201cwhose result could be good or bad but is impossible to predict or control because so much chance is involved\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

New Year\u2019s Eve, 1990, on board the Falcon, where Anna Funder knew she\u2019d found the one.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Courtesy Craig Allchin<\/cite><\/p>\n

When I look back on the boat incident it reminds me that we live our lives going forward, taking blind chances in the dark at every turn. Will the boat sink? Or will the young man silently save everyone? Whatever happens, what will it do to the woman watching, her heart racing with terror, and with something else, too? It\u2019s a crap shoot. We can only make sense of it afterwards, retrofitting a story to match its outcome.<\/p>\n

Craig dived and rose, and dived and rose again. Then he clambered back on board: he could not find the hole. We were still taking water. The stern of the boat, where I sat, was listing down. Ella and the Duke sang on. Craig and his brother-in-law started quietly but frantically opening hatches to below the deck, the shower and toilet system, to where the engine was.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald sang on amid a New Year\u2019s Eve drama on Lake Eildon.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n

Eventually they found a hose meant to release water had come unstuck, and water was pouring through the aperture into the hull. They clamped it shut, started the pump and went back to the party. They didn\u2019t say anything to anyone.<\/p>\n

If I had to tell my friend at lunch, I\u2019d say that\u2019s when I knew. I didn\u2019t know all the adventures in life and love we\u2019d have \u2013 the travel, the children, the uncountable joys and occasional, blindsiding sadnesses \u2013 the sheer good fortune of being together through it all, and of having your world expanded by someone else\u2019s perception of it.<\/p>\n

But what I knew then in my gut was that I wanted to be with this man who would swim blindly through the dark to save people, and who would then go back to the party without a word. If I could credit myself with any thought at all, as I watched him dance, wet curls on his neck, it was, \u201cI want to be on his boat\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cRomance, like a beautiful lake, holds its own dangers,\u201d writes Anna Funder of a New Year\u2019s Eve party on Lake Eildon.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Jason South<\/cite><\/p>\n

I told that story at our wedding, which was the first time I\u2019d put those pieces of our past together to make some sense of it, which is to say, a story. We moved from Melbourne to Sydney, had our first child. Craig travelled to China, designing cities there, in the enormous effort to bring millions of people out of poverty. He was away so much that new friends thought he was a fiction, and I a single mother with a cover story (\u201cDon\u2019t tell Anna,\u201d they joked, \u201cbut they already have cities in China\u201d). I worked on my first book, Stasiland<\/em>, and looked after our daughter.<\/p>\n

Our lives expanded in a way that thrilled us.<\/p>\n

But part of our little family was missing \u2013 Falcon. So, Craig arranged for the boat to be loaded by crane onto a custom-built cradle on a vast truck and driven, Fitzcarraldo<\/em>-style, as he says, up the Hume Highway to Sydney.<\/p>\n

Falcon lived on the harbour for a while, but we didn\u2019t have the time or money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. While we thrived, she languished. Eventually we sold her to a farmer in South Australia, who dug a hull-sized hole in the ground to keep her in, and spent 10 years restoring her, before selling her on again.<\/p>\n

We were blessed with two more children; our lives expanded in a way that thrilled us. Craig travelled to the cities he was working on and I travelled, too, on book tours. One time I was pregnant, another time breastfeeding the next baby, leaving the toddlers at home. We considered ourselves so lucky to be able to juggle two creative careers and three children: a big life.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m finding midlife interesting creatively and in every way. I know the outcome of more stories, I can string together the pieces of life that got us, and people we know, where we are.<\/p>\n

I wrote a book about women\u2019s unseen, unpaid work in the home, looking at the life of George Orwell\u2019s first wife, Eileen, and how she has been made to disappear in history. I worked on it for six years, pretty much every day, every holiday. Part of it is about the couple\u2019s time in the Spanish Civil War \u2013 to my shame it took me longer to write than the Orwells actually spent there. Craig would open the bedroom door of my studio, of a rented beach house in summer, a ski lodge in winter, offering coffee: \u201cStill in Spain?\u201d he\u2019d grin.<\/p>\n

While I was on a fellowship at Oxford, he had to sell our house. While I was in Scotland, tracing Orwell\u2019s steps there, our son broke his arm. We smiled at the deep irony of a woman writing about invisible women\u2019s work while her husband took care of work, life, children, holidays, house and her. We thought the book was important to write \u2013 for our children, for the historical record, for everyone. Still, some debts can probably never be repaid.<\/p>\n

Midlife is a hingeing point, a change of perspective: I have the endings for stories begun years ago, and the future seems more precious for feeling its finitude in my bones. (This isn\u2019t morbid; my mother died before she was my age, so in some deep sense I can\u2019t shake I\u2019m in \u201ctime on\u201d, as the footballers would say.) I\u2019m thrilled to watch our children as young people encountering the world, growing into themselves.<\/p>\n

Some of my friends have experienced this preciousness as urgency and wanted to change their story, to start a new one. There has been a bit of relationship carnage around us; the illicit texts, the too-many calls, the odd, inappropriately intimate photo shared. People discovered things they\u2019d rather not have seen on their partners\u2019 phones. Still, I wasn\u2019t prepared for it when it came. I was in the US judging a literary prize when I got Craig\u2019s text, complete with a photo.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer name is Avanti,\u201d he wrote; \u201c32-footer.\u201d And a picture of a lovely old Halvorsen.<\/p>\n

This year I toured on and off for five months after Wifedom<\/em> came out, and Craig held the fort again, with our almost grown children. They can be left now (\u201cI\u2019m not just surviving without you,\u201d one of them told us recently, \u201cI\u2019m thriving\u201d). So, sometimes we travel together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anna Funder with her husband Craig and the restored Falcon.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Courtesy Craig Allchin<\/cite><\/p>\n

When I spoke in the Barossa, we had an ulterior motive \u2013 to visit Goolwa, at the mouth of the Murray River. Falcon, now out of the memory-hole and restored to glory, lives there, where she leads the sail-pasts at the boat club. Her new owner kindly took us for a cruise and let us stay the night on her, where it all began.<\/p>\n

The boat felt newer than it ever had been and our past resurrected, afloat with us inside it. I thought of Craig\u2019s deep-dive into the dark.<\/p>\n

Some things you can never find adequate thanks for, especially all the times you were saved without knowing.<\/p>\n

Wifedom<\/em> is published by Hamish Hamilton.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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