Читать книгу A Life of Pride - Alan G Pride - Страница 13

There were no servants for us at home, and few labour-saving machines. This meant lots of manual work for kids and adults. We had electricity, but early on our hot water came from a wood heater - guess whose job it was to chop the wood. Six days a week, we’d wash ourselves out of bowls, but on Friday night the portable tin bath would be filled with buckets of water from the heater and everyone would have a bath. Sophia was first, then everyone in descending order until my turn came. By then the water was quite dirty! We couldn’t waste it though, as we had no town water and depended on rain runoff from the house roof, filling a big cement tank in the backyard. Dad had built it and sometimes he and I would clean and patch it, which meant his putting me in through the manhole.

The toilet was a narrow brick building against the backyard fence, with a seat and a pan. The pan was taken out through a slot in the rear of the wall and emptied into a tank on a horse-drawn cart, which travelled the lanes weekly. The driver was an aboriginal lad with whom I became quite friendly. The sewage would then be dumped into a hole, out in the desert. Toilet paper was made from newspaper cut into squares.

We had no refrigeration in the house in the 1930s, so I’d ride my bike several times a week to the iceworks a few streets away. I had a hessian bag wrapped around the handlebars, onto which the iceworks man, Barney Roberts, would put a big block of ice. It cost sixpence and weighed about 12 pounds (1 pound = 0.453592 kg) - a bit heavy for a small boy, but it was my job. I’d balance it home and put it in the ice-chest, down in the cellar.

We also had a ‘Coolgardie Safe’ down there, a fine-mesh cage draped in hessian, with a tray at the base. Water was poured into a reservoir atop the cage, to soak down through the hessian into the tray and cool the food in the cage. Mum also got around the lack of refrigeration by walking to the shops most days for fresh food: shops did have fridges.

No air-conditioning in homes back then, of course, but the cellar was always cool. As she got older, Sophia would often have a siesta down there in the afternoon. The walls were white-washed. Air and light came down through a barred window above the footpath in the front garden, but it always smelt musty from the salty groundwater seeping into a pit under the floorboards. (50 years later, my sister Gloria died after being hit on the head by the cellar trapdoor.)

Mum and Sophia went to a lot of trouble with the meals. It was very British- style cooking back then, with meat and veg, bread and butter puddings and so on. We would also have rabbits once I started catching them, and kangaroo-tail soup later still, when I went roo-shooting. My father wouldn't let us talk at the table : I always disliked that and encouraged dinner discussions, when I had my own family later on.

[Marilyn writes: 'My cousin Marie ( Gloria's daughter) told me that Reg kept Ethel short of house-keeping money—once the weekly allocation was spent, he wouldn't hand over any more. He used to get stale greenish mutton from the butcher; it smelt so bad that Marie, visiting her grandparents often as a child, wondered how they didn't get sick eating it. Ethel would put it in the sink and soak it in vinegar to make it palatable. When Gloria was married, she had use of her husbands' business grocery account, which she’d use to help her mother get extra supplies. Reg would even go through her rubbish bin in search of food, which he would insist was too good to throw out!']

We did have a family speciality from Mum’s side of the family: Cornish pasties. Sophia’s parents had brought the recipe to Australia with them. The pasty is a dinner-plate-sized round of thin pastry, which in our family's version is heaped with cubed steak or mutton, flaked parsnips or turnips, potatoes, salt and pepper, lots of parsley, and never peas, carrots or other vegetables. It's shaped into a long parcel, crimped shut along the top, then brushed with milk or egg and baked in the oven. The women in Cornish mining families would get up at 4 a.m to cook these for the men to take to work in the mines as their 'crib' (lunch). The kitchen would be cooler then, too. After I left home, there'd always be a 'pasty day' on my return visits, and my appetite became so legendary that Mum once challenged me with a pasty 30 cm long. I ate it too, no problem!

There was a lot of house-cleaning in the 1930s when huge black dust-storms swept over Broken Hill. Rabbits, grazing and wood-cutting had turned the surrounding scrubby plains to total deserts. Sand blew and drifted everywhere. The storms would come in over the tailings dumps, the residue of the ore dug up underground, now piled into a mountain a couple of kilometres long and 20 metres high. The wind would pick up this black stuff, along with the desert sand, and hurl it through town like a cyclone. I remember coming home speckled with blood from the abrasive storm-dust. Mum would stop all the gaps under the doors and windows with towels and newspaper, but it still got in.

This went on till the late ‘30s when the amateur botanist, Albert Morris, and the mine manager, Jim Keast, started a big plant-regeneration belt around the town. They fenced out rabbits and planted thousands of native trees and shrubs, a project way ahead of its time. Today, it’s a beautiful sight and the dust storms are no more.