Claire Harvey: Elderly couple Muriel and Reg helped shape my childhood

A LONG relationship with neighbours Reg and Muriel helped define Claire Harvey’s early childhood and instilled great values at a young age.

Reg and Muriel Stocks were a vital and vibrant part of Claire Harvey’s childhood.

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REG Stocks was my best friend in the neighbourhood. I was six. He was in his 70s.

Reg and his wife Muriel were a retired­ couple who moved to the Canberra suburbs after selling their sheep station.

My relationship with them, accidental in its way — they happened to buy the house two doors down from us and their own daughters and grandkids lived in faraway cities — shaped the childhood of myself and my brother Adam, and, I think, helped define us and our values.

A teenage Claire Harvey greets Muriel Stocks.

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Over a thousand glasses of cordial, they gave us the gift of storytelling.

She was soft and powdery. He had redeployed his agricultural expertise into a garden the envy of the entire neighbourhood; plush green lawn and a bountiful vegie patch, even while everyone else’s yard crackled beige in the endless early-1980s dry.

Reg and Muriel’s house smelt sensational­. Fruitcake. Anzacs. Valvoline. Daphne, a massive bush of it that grew outside the front door, perfuming the front yard with whiffs of lemon and marshmallow.

Muriel used to cut massive armfuls of it for me when I drove to visit them during my 20s.

The Stocks also spent plenty of time with Adam, Claire’s brother.

They’d be standing in the driveway waiting for me when I pulled in and I’d jump out to hug them, every year noticing they seemed a little smaller and frailer, these people whose presence had, more than anyone else outside my immediate family, shaped my childhood and my understanding of love.

They were, in hindsight, also the people who taught me most about the value of community. Almost every day from the age of four to 19, I’d go to visit Reg and Muriel, or one of them would come up to visit us. In the  school  holidays  I’d   wake   late to hear Reg sitting at our kitchen table, cracking jokes with my own Grandma.

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He was full of stories. Most of them, I was astonished to discover as I grew into adolescence, were true. The time he fought in the Battle of Britain as a fighter pilot. The time he got shot down and spent two days bobbing in the ocean. The time he contracted malaria during the war and spent weeks shivering and sweating.

Reg and Muriel had a lifetime of adventures to share with an eager ­little listener.

After the war, when he returned to the bush and became captain of the bushfire brigade.

To me, especially as I grew older, they were the most glamorous people in the neighbourhood.

Reg and Muriel had a lifetime of adventures to share with an eager ­little listener, evoking a world of 1950s country tennis parties and Country Women’s Association baking contests; epic train journeys and horseriding accidents; the exoticism and romance of two lives about as far from suburban Canberra as you could get.

Reg Stocks had plenty of war stories — literally.

I’d wander down there and Reg would be sitting in the garage, beside his exquisitely polished tan Ford sedan, reading the paper, poised to leap out of his chair and suggest something for us to do together.

I’d go inside and Muriel would give me a Jatz and cheese, or a butterfly cake with pillowy whipped cream piled on. She didn’t know — or didn’t particularly care — that it was the 1980s and chubby pre-teen girls were supposed to eat Ryvita with cottage cheese.

We’d flick through her wedding photo album together, or I’d go out the back and help Reg re-pot seedlings while he told me adventure ­stories from the war.

Our house was open-plan and sunny. Theirs was dim and cool, shutters closed against the summer bake.

There was a huge portrait of Reg’s beautiful sister on one wall; she’d died in an accident in her late teens.

They showed me photos of their visits to their own beloved grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who lived in other cities, and proudly ­rattled off their achievements.

“Nine on the runway, two in the hangar,” Reg would say about the impending birth of another set of twins.

Being friends with Reg and Muriel never felt like an act of charity or neighbourly duty.

It was the other way around. I was flattered they thought I was interesting enough to hang out with.

I was flattered they thought I was interesting enough to hang out with.

I kept visiting them in Canberra — sometimes flying home from overseas with that express purpose — until Reg passed away and Muriel moved to Sydney to be with her own family, and I visited her in her nursing home until she died.

My friendship with Muriel deepened then, when she did all the talking about her own life, uninterrupted by Reg’s jokes and funny stories.

She was extraordinarily liberal in her social views for a country woman of her generation; speaking with compassion and insight about boat people, Aborigines, immigrants of all types, teenagers, drug addicts.

Up until her death at 93 I learnt something from her every time we spoke.

When I finally did meet that perfect man, get married and buy a house, they weren’t around to meet him, or to visit. And when I had my first baby, I desperately wished I could take him to visit them, show them his tiny fingernails.

I named him Reg. It seemed the least I could do.