How to decipher a clothesline
My clothesline is a semaphore where signals pegged onto it connect me to friends and family—here in New Zealand, and in London, St Petersburg and Porto. The line flies up into another sphere where clothes flap in the breeze on a good drying day for friendship, life and death.
New Zealand, in the nineteen fifties. A neighbour looked over the fence at the line in our garden in Canterbury when I was five. ‘How those Chapman girls are shooting up!’ The rows of nappies had gone. Now rompers and little shirts were pegged out to dry.
Clotheslines in gardens all down our street signalled neighbours. If my mother went out somewhere and it started to rain, she knew her neighbour next door would run over to take them off the line, fold them in the basket, and leave it on our kitchen table. The door wasn’t locked. In those days, no one locked their door in small Canterbury towns like the one where I grew up.
When my great-grandmother hung out the washing in colonial New Zealand, she didn’t peg her drawers on the line. The men clearing the land would see them, and she felt shy about that. A washing day, another washing day. The men never saw her drawers drying on the line. So they pooled their money and bought some for her, figuring she couldn’t afford to buy them.
What I’ve deciphered from clotheslines.
London, 2008. I stayed with Deborah before going to live in Portugal. Bryan walked past, while I was pegging out the clothes. He smiled at my system.
‘How do you peg them?’ I asked.
‘I don’t.’ He laughed. ‘If I do, Deborah comes down and pegs them in a different way. I get the colours wrong.’
This had nothing to do with colours fading in the sun. It was because she was an artist, and had her own sequence. Reds, blues, yellows … Bryan’s drab socks.
Nelson, 2015. My childhood friend Rachel Bush was making dinner, and glanced through the window at the clouds.
‘If you could just bring the clothes in.’
I unpegged and folded, sorting as I went. Sheets. Towels. Rachel’s underwear. Richard’s underwear. Mine. I brought the basket inside.
‘Good heavens,’ said Rachel. ‘They’ve never been folded so carefully.’
Rachel was a reader and a poet. She never got her Girl Guide’s badge for sewing, and she didn’t embrace housekeeping.
Wellington, 2018. My sister Mirian was carrying a basket of washing to the clothesline in her garden. Sunday = washing day. She felt put out if it wasn’t a good drying day. I ran out to help. Wet sheets blew against our faces while we pegged and talked. We didn’t know that Mirian had only one year of Sundays left for hanging out clothes, or doing anything else.
Manganui, 2020. Five of us were in the car on our way to Anthea’s funeral. Leslie was driving and Derry was sitting beside him. Isabella, Peggy and I were in a row on the back seat. We were talking about Peggy’s new electric car. That got us onto old-fashioned washing machines, and in no time we were talking about clotheslines. What were those wooden sticks called, the long sticks with a notch at the end? They held up the line to stop clothes dragging on the ground. The word had gone clean out of our minds.
The car stopped, and we were there. We walked through the bush to a viewpoint over the harbour. There were the other people, standing around on the grassy hilltop, holding things they’d brought to remember Anthea by. This was her third funeral, because her friends lived all over the North Island. This one was for singing, stories, and talks.
It was sunny, and the wind drove waves onto the shore below us. Still damp from tears, we were pegged out in a meandering line across the grass, like a clothesline on a good drying day. On the way home from Anthea’s funeral I remembered what that wooden stick was. A clothes pole.
Waipapa, 2022. Very early in the morning, Leslie went to someone’s house near the village, where the husband had probably seen a dollar bird. The wife had heard it, whatever it was, and the screeching was driving her mad.
The report that a dollar bird might be there caused an online flurry of birders. They calculated whether they could get to see it, and was it really that bird. Leslie was the advance party. He persuaded me to get up at the crack of dawn to go with him. I took my book, because this can mean hanging around getting cold and going away with nothing to show for it. We did the nothing-to-show-for-it, but in a charming spot, with interesting people. They were strangers when we arrived, but not when we left.
Leslie made a base at the edge of the trees with his cameras, binoculars and tripod.
‘If you’re all right there,’ said David, ‘I’ll put out my washing.’
I saw their clothesline at the edge of the garden, against some trees. It was a beauty. Three lines, with wooden posts at each end to support them. Nice and taut. No need for a clothes pole.
He came out of the house with his basket of clothes. I went over to the line, and started pegging beside him. Yellow towels, a white towel, underpants, knickers, tea towels. A gold sleeveless top was inside out and I turned it right side out before pegging it up. The clothes basket was on the ground between us, and we nudged it along with our feet as we pegged and chatted.
‘What’s your system?’ I asked.
‘I don’t have one.’
I told him about Deborah coming along and re-pegging the clothes that Bryan pegged up because she liked the colours in a different order.
His wife came out of the house. We were on the third basketful now.
‘Hello,’ Eileen said. She turned the gold top inside out again, and pegged it back on the line. ‘Do you want to see my vegetable garden?’
It was just a step from her vegetable garden to the little hothouses, and the fruit trees, and the fruit tied up in onion bags to save them from the birds.
‘We have lots of those bags,’ I told her. ‘Do you want some?’
‘I’ll take any you can spare.’
It was just a step from onion bags to living frugally in the environment, and how they manage to do that.
‘What about geothermal power?’ I asked.
‘We didn’t put it in when we built the house twenty-seven years ago. Now I wish we had.’
‘What about septic tanks?’
It wasn’t exactly a red rag to a bull, but my question provoked an indignant story about their perfectly good tanks and the council’s insistence that every five years they must …
‘What about worm tanks instead of septic tanks?’
‘Tell me!’ she exclaimed.
I did. My sister Eirene and I stayed at her daughter’s holiday house on the Coromandel peninsula five or six years ago. The sea was wonderful, the view was wonderful, the worm tank was wonderful.
The man came to check it.
‘No need for a septic tank,’ he said. ‘All the nasty stuff that comes from the toilet and laundry is piped into here, and the worms love it. They eat it up, turn it into their good poo, and it goes out through a long pipe, around the garden, feeding the plants.’
‘There’s no smell at all.’ He lifted off the lid. ‘Here, stick your noses in.’ We stuck our noses in. He was right, no smell. Just worms in the shady tank, earning their living.
Eileen and I had pegged our conversation onto a neighbourly line, and now it stretched into the house.
‘Don’t go now,’ said David, when Leslie packed up his things—not having heard the screech or seen the bird. ‘Come in for a cup of tea.’
The big room was for eating and cooking, with a desk as well, and some old cane furniture. The floor was tangerine-painted concrete; the walls were deep yellow; the side of the staircase to the next floor was a good strong blue. Who wouldn’t warm to people who painted their room tangerine, yellow and blue, then painted an old cane table yellow and put a blue ceramic vase on it.
‘What sort of tea? Jasmine, green?’
I watched David make it, noticing how they’d arranged the kitchen part of the room. No bland rows of cupboards. A wood-burning cooking stove on legs, with a white enamel front.
I was delighted by the white enamel stove. I told David about Tatyana’s black iron stove, made by a German company in the nineteenth century. Her parents didn’t need it in St Petersburg, so they took it to the family dacha, their summer house in the forest.
‘And I gave Tatyana my table-top kerosene cooker. It’s iron, with speckled green enamel, and it came from Holland.’
‘Smelly things, kerosene cookers,’ said David. ‘I know them too well.’
He handed us our mugs of tea.
Eileen wrote down her email address so I could send anything else I knew about worm systems. Then she had to go out somewhere, and gave me a hug. Instead of saying goodbye, I leaned over to whisper in her ear. ‘Think worm tanks.’
There was no dollar bird. What the two of them heard was another bird altogether. But the absent dollar bird did its work, because without it—or the hope of it—their clothesline with the tea towels, underpants, knickers and gold top would not have Tatyana’s Russian stove, my kerosene stove from Holland, and my sister’s worm tank pegged out beside them.
Aotearoa, 2026. If only I could have a clothesline—but there’s nowhere to put it. Instead, I see a family of quail overhead on a tree branch, lined up in suspense, looking for me to scatter birdseed on the driveway. Swaying slightly, the birds signal to each other and to me – a vision of connection to enfold and carry forward.
Ann Palmer was born in New Zealand, worked in London as a bibliographer, and then St Petersburg giving seminars for teachers of English. After several years in Porto, becoming a citizen and enjoying her new life there, she has returned to New Zealand. She spends her time writing and reading of course, and out with her camera. Street scenes, nature, art and architecture, people—seen in the artistic moment, translated into words.