Okay, the weather has deteriorated today. Winter still isn’t quite over. Spring is teasing us. The daffs are out. The magnolias are blossoming, but the weather is still cold. My dream last night; I was showing a friend photos of the coastline where my family live in Oz on the Illawarra peninsula: the rocky headlands, the pounding surf, the seawater lap pools carved into the headlands and the golden sand. In the dream I said to her, “Not long now until summer.” When I woke up, I felt homesick. For an Aussie Sheila who spent long stretches of her early life submerged under water, I realised, like an amphibian, that I need warm water to engulf me. I grew up under the water line, in its tomb like quietness. It was where I thought, wondered, dreamt, grew, budded, developed into womanhood.

Yesterday at the Hurlingham Club, I played a splendid game of tennis with some elderly pheasants. We wore regulation white. It was sunny and warm, a luxurious glimpse of summer. Mice man laid bait.

I mentioned yesterday, that I was like a kangaroo. Well, when I was 14, I visited my Auntie Wilma’s farm in the grasslands west of Sydney, just before the Outback and the red desert, where the aborigines wander around and eat widgedee grubs. Shaun and I spent our August school holidays there just like Bev (Mum) did during her childhood.  I came back to Sydney with a pet kangaroo in my back pack, which I named Jadey.

This is not what city kids usually end up bringing home as a souvenir.

One night I was driving through the farm with Wilma’s husband, Don, when we came upon ‘roos feeding on wheat crops. Don stopped the ‘ute (utility truck) and loaded his shotgun. I started to sob. I’d seen too many episodes of “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo”, but I was also resigned. It was the law of the land. Kangaroos are pests. As Don’s bullet hit the mother, I saw her reach into her pouch and throw to safety a little tiny baby – a joey. I pleaded with Don not to shoot the joey trapped helplessly in the headlights. “Please, please Uncle Don, don’t shoot it.” It won’t survive he told me. “Oh, I’ve got a great idea. I’ll take it back to Sydney with me,” I pleaded through tears. Don hesitated. Then he put down his gun. As he unloaded his gun he said, “I don’t know how you’ll do it. But I believe you. If you don’t, it will have to be shot.”

When Wilma saw me get out of the ‘ute with a joey a foot high, at first she threw a fit. But she eventually relented and showed me how to look after it. She made makeshift pouches from old jumpers, which she cut holes in and secured underneath with a belt. That’s where Jadey snoozed by day, like she had with her mother. At night she slept in an old hessian wheat sack tied to my bedroom door. When the time came to leave the farm, we bought a small back pack and smuggled her onto the 10 seater plane. She slept most of the way, and if she stuck her head out, Shaun and I pushed it back down again. In those days, they didn’t check bags on domestic flights.

So Jadey came to live in suburban Sydney with us. Bev adored her. Tied a towel nappy around her. Eventually she started jumping and bumping around the house.  Stan was fed up when she jumped over the coffee table, and landed on his head while he was having a snooze on the sofa. “Strewth, its either me or the kangaroo!”  Sadly, Jadey was relocated to a kangaroo petting zoo, but I still went to visit her after she left.

I am part of a group of volunteers who, six times a year, put on a free classical concert and tea for senior citizens at St Paul’s, Onslow Sqaure, South Kensington. It involves making a hundreds of sandwiches and cups of tea. There is a mountain of washing up. The Duchess of Cornwall came to our Jubilee Concert! Our guests of honour are the Chelsea Pensioners, magnificent in their scarlet uniforms. Today is the event. 

This morning I was greeted by warm sunshine, flooding into my cosy Fulham bedroom. We are having such a damp winter. Rain, more rain, and then even more rain…most days. Even at the pinnacle of the South Downs, where you expect good drainage, you will find a mud-fest at present.

Yesterday, I watched close friends renew their marriage vows on their 25^th anniversary. Everyone in attendance had been at their wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton, Knightsbridge, in 1991, and here we were all again. Except of course their two daughters.

The same vicar presided. His opening comment was that everyone must have sent their parents in their place. Polite chuckles could be heard. I thought, “Thank God for hair dye.” Some were thicker, and some were thinner. And many of the same crowd had been at my wedding 27 years ago.

Like any animal in a new terrain, my senses were on red alert during the early years in London. I studied the Sloane species with a metaphorical microscope, working out their speech, habits and manners. If only Downton Abbey had been on TV then. I wanted to blend in for the sake of my new husband, Geoff.  To be honest, I just wanted to blend in.

Nevertheless, I was a kangaroo in a field of pheasants and stags. And they could tell that. No amount of Russell and Bromley shoes, leather with gold buckles, or Alice headbands that I wore, could conceal the Aussie Sheila within. Like a kanga, I was always jumping and bumping into the wrong things. Or people.

Living with Nicky St John helped my education enormously, but the kanga was still peeking out of its pouch. You can take the Aussie Sheila out of Australia, but you can’t take the Aussie out of the Sheila. I found after a while that I was saying words like “absolutely” instead of “yeah”, and “super” instead of “great”. Trying to adopt the lingo (language).

And weddings were a big part of the early years. Life was like Four Weddings and a Funeral, but without the funeral.  On travels back to Australia, I had silk outfits made in Bangkok in bright colours – orange coral, canary yellow and blue turquoise – with huge padded, bouffant shoulders. I wore large brimmed hats that eclipsed my sight. It was impossible to kiss people hello. And a nightmare that Sloanes kiss twice; one on each cheek. Princess Diana was my role model.

Our friends’ wedding day is a vivid memory. The couple had a glamorous reception at the Accademia Italiano, now defunct, just off Hyde Park. The backdrop was Canaletto paintings framing us, as we sipped vintage champagne and scoffed bite-sized canapés. 

But to this day, I can remember the feeling of being an outsider. Like I was watching everything through a glass barrier. And I felt lonely. I had my handsome new husband who adored me, but I needed friends.

Rumour had it then (and still now!), that the Establishment is reluctant to open the gate to their paddock, whoops, sorry, field and let outsiders in.

I thought that if you didn’t know how to shoot, fish and ski, you were done for. If you didn’t know that there were certain words that would make the pheasants and stags wince, words like serviette, lounge, toilet. Well, I soon learnt to stop saying those words, and I substituted their ones.

And yet as I sat in the church yesterday, I realised that I had forged a good life in Britain. I had worked out that wherever you are, whenever, it is better to be yourself. No-one likes a fake. I have met a lot of pheasants and stags that have opened the gate to me, and welcomed me. You know who you are and I am very grateful.

So today, I have a tennis match at the Hurlingham Club, and then the mice man is coming. We have mice. End of terrace houses, apparently, are prone to them. And soon I’ll tell you about how I met my husband and ended up living in Sloane Land.

I just opened the curtains to find a heavy frost on the lawn and the cricket ground beyond. Just like sparkling diamonds encrusted on emerald in the watery morning sunshine.

Yesterday the bloke came to quote on repairing the fence. Why is it always more than you hoped it would cost! Lunch at Anna’s godmother’s house in Winchester – always a tonic. Tennis training at 7pm – fun as usual, although freezing.  Floodlit outdoor courts.

Anna’s godmother is Nicola (Nicky) Barber.  She is worth writing about. She was my first Sloane friend. We shared the top floor of a flat in Battersea in 1988. I was fresh off the plane from Sydney. She’d relocated from Edinburgh to work at Sotheby’s on Bond Street. Her maiden name was St John. Not pronounced as it sounds. It is pronounced “Sin Gin”. Rowan Atkinson make a ‘dog’s dinner’ out of the surname in the Richard Curtis film Four Weddings and a Funeral.  Hilarious wedding scene where he is the vicar, and he repeatedly mispronounces the groom’s name.

My landlady, Lucy Hurst-Brown (double barreled of course), was adamant that Nicky and I would not get on, as we were too different: chalk and cheese.

Our first meeting was on a Sunday afternoon. I was lonely and cold, and had been watching television in the sitting room. I remember the first programme was Only Fools and Horses, which I’d never seen in Oz. It was the one where Del Boy and the gang hang chandeliers in a stately home, and they come crashing down. I laughed out loud. It became a fav tv show. The second program was a David Attenborough documentary on moles. In a deadpan voice he described how the male and female moles would find each other in a dark tunnel and copulate. The moles were screeching away and violently wrestling each other during his commentary. It was the contrast between his deadpan voice and the dramatic visual that riveted me. My first lesson in British understatement.

Nicky had been away for the weekend. At the end of the 80s, single Sloanes invariably left London over the weekend. Nicky is tall, elegant, slender and has a cut glass accent. I am short, blonde (not natural anymore) and, at the time, I was tomboyish. We hit it off immediately. My first words to her were along the lines of, “Strewth, it’s cold in this house. Do you know how to turn on the fire?” Unbeknownst to me, Lucy only ever allowed it to be on if she had guests. Nicky, who is very law abiding, nevertheless took pity on me and turned it on.

She really took me under her wing. Her room was ordered and neat, with watercolours of Scotland, painted by her grandfather, hanging on the walls. My room had nothing in it. I just chucked the contents of my suitcase in the cupboard. Occasionally I would return home to find her white teddy bear “Fluffy” sitting up on my pillow case. Nicky felt sorry that I lived such a minamalist life. Sloanes adored knick-knacs back in the 80s and 90s. The more the merrier. They believed that clutter made things cosy.  

Nicky would always let me have the first bath. And I left it in a tip. Never rinsed it out, and left greasy remnants of blue Fengel bath oil for her. She made me Mighty White toast every morning with marmalade – a new taste for me. And then we rushed to catch the train. She would stride out, and I would almost have to run to keep up. Once on, I would chat away like a kookaburra at the top of my lungs, and she would indulge me until one day she said, “Sandra, people don’t talk on trains. They read the paper.” I had so much to learn.

So today I’m back up to London. Geoff and I are going to attend a ‘renewal of wedding vows’, and there will be a lot of old friends there. Then more friends for dinner.