Underground, life is a miracle of lively correspondence

UNDERNEATH a fibro house in the beachside southern stretches of Sydney dubbed "God's country", my grandfather has created a den.

UNDERNEATH a fibro house in the beachside southern stretches of Sydney dubbed "God's country", my grandfather has created a den.

It has a carpeted floor, a radio, a desk and a chair, and a cartoon sketch of my grandmother framed on the wall. This is where Grandpa spends most of his time these days, when he's not sitting on his pride and joy, the outdoor dunny, which he has adorned with a plush cushioned seat.

You can't blame a man of 90 years old, married for 66 of those years, for wanting to crawl underneath his own house and stay there. Embedded somewhere in the grass outside is his wife's wedding ring, smashed with a meat mallet 25 years ago when Nanna "resigned from the marriage".

It's easier to gaze these days at a cartoon sketch than to battle it out upstairs over who cooks a superior pea and ham soup.

The male urge to escape domestic life and retreat into the garden shed, a place of industry and order, is well-documented. Another great source of home-based meditation is the home brewery.

And then there's the toilet, that temple of solitude beside which men stack magazines and novels by Ben Elton.

I have never understood the urge to sit surrounded by one's own toilet fumes for long periods in the loo.

I can better understand the desire to crawl underneath a house. This house, with its magnolia trees out the front and its resident garden gnomes, was purchased by my grandparents - pound stg. 10 Poms - after they both toiled at several jobs while living with their five children in a mice-ridden migrant hostel. Grandpa worked as a chef for Qantas by day, and by night headed to a restaurant for the evening shift. Nanna worked as demonstrator of vacuum cleaners in Walton's before it went bust, where she is best remembered for seeing off a particularly demanding and prudish customer by offering to plug in a vacuum cleaner and demonstrate its capacity for delivering a "first-class blow-job".

For my grandfather, the den's merits over the shed or brewery are literary. He has to bend almost double to get inside the den, and once inside he spends his entire time seated at a desk writing letters. If you manage to catch him on the phone before he's gone underground for the day, he reacts to any suggestion of an outing or visit with incredulity.

"Oh no, dear," he says, amazed that anyone might expect he had time for socialising. "I'm behind in my correspondence."

Correspondence is divided into personal letters on airmail envelopes to distant relatives in England, some of whom may or may not be dead, and then there is the business correspondence, mostly letters to politicians, from the Prime Minister's office to state leaders and all the way down to the local member of parliament, who knows him well.

Political correspondence is mostly on the topic of veterans' entitlements or general complaints about war. A great pacifist who holds idealistic visions for worldwide harmony and union, Grandpa is still not over his disappointment that Esperanto did not catch on as a global language.

We tried to get him on to the idea of a word processor, so he could email his correspondence, but the lesson began and ended with a failed attempt to type the words "Dear sir". Pressing the letter D on the keyboard, Grandpa was outraged when he could not seem to produce just one D and instead 26 Ds appeared across the screen as he kept his finger on the button. He can't seem to shake the typewriter mentality.

In recent years, letters to relatives have consisted of blow-by-blow accounts of family weddings. He seems particularly pleased at the passage of his 92-year-old sister into dementia. He reasons that as she probably won't remember the last account of a fairy-tale wedding, he can recreate the scene in letter after letter, ad infinitum, without her ever getting bored.

It doesn't matter that one of these fairy-tale weddings has already ended in divorce.

"Oh yes, well that was unfortunate," he responded when I pointed out that in the interests of disclosure, he might update Elsa on the collapse of my cousin's marriage. "But there's no need to go into it dear. It was still a fairy-tale wedding."