Читать книгу Down a Country Lane - Gary Blinco - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

‘The life so short, the craft so long to learn’

Hippocrates

About six years had passed and I was no longer the helpless child who had first come to the farm in my mother’s arms. While my memories of those very early days were obscure, I often experienced a vivid recollection of some event or other. I know we had been at the farm for several years when Dad suddenly appeared to be spending an increasing amount of time away. Money was tight as usual and, as much as he hated it, Mum convinced him that he had to do some work for wages to make ends meet. He often disappeared for days at a time as he worked at various tasks, but he always reappeared miraculously with supplies just as we were about to run out of food. Our confidence in Dad grew and we never doubted his ability to deliver enough for us to survive, and survival was all we knew and therefore all we wanted.

Dad now saw himself as his own man; a self-employed farmer and he hated the prospect of working for a boss again. I do not know what bad experience in his past caused him to hate working for a boss with such passion, but he resisted the option until there was no alternative. It must have been with great reluctance on his part, but common sense won out in the end and he looked for work while Mum and we kids ran the farm. There always seemed to be plenty of work about if he wanted it. He was a good all round handyman and could turn his hand to most things if he chose to.

Dad’s reputation as a handyman had spread throughout the district. The local farmers (Cockies as Dad called them begrudgingly) often came around to commission him to repair an engine, build a fence or do some carpentry work. He had set up a sawmill a few months ago for a farmer who wanted to mill the cypress pine timber on his block in order to build two farmhouses. Dad had worked in timber mills with my grandfather so he knew how to set up a sawmill from scratch. He gained almost legend status with the mill project and I think he could have taken it further, perhaps developing his own mill. However, the job completed and the farmhouses built, he seemed to lose interest.

When he wanted work it was usually there for the asking, but with Dad the asking was the problem most of the time. He preferred people to ask him first, that way he could reconcile his pride by being seen to help a neighbour in trouble. Thus it became a bit of a dilemma because most of the bigger farmers were afraid of offending his fiercely independent nature by offering him work. But he took to working for wages for a while and spending too much time away from us all in the process.

Of course we children all thought Dad was simply the smartest person on earth, probably because we had little basis for comparison, though I often thought he was sometimes big on dreams and short on action. He liked to sit on the back steps for hours, smoking, looking into the distance and dreaming. While he had many good ideas they mostly fizzled out in the end due to lost interest, lack of capital or both.

It was a blistering hot summer’s day, the bush alive with birds and butterflies and the garden lush with a maturing crop, but Dad came home through the wonders of nature in a foul mood. I ran out to meet him, to catch a ride down the lane on the running board of the Overland. To my surprise and pain he cuffed me on the ear and sent me sprawling away from the car into the hard black earth beside the lane. ‘Don’t you know that’s bloody dangerous, you stupid little galah’, he yelled as I stared up at him with a mixture of pain and surprise. ‘If I run over you, your mother would never let me hear the end of it.’ Dad often spoiled me and this unusual action sent me running and bawling ahead of him into the house, burying my teary face in Mum’s apron. Mum met Dad at the door, a bit wide- eyed and confused herself.

‘Why did you hit the poor little bugger?’ She demanded. ‘You let him ride on the running board all the time. Who were you really hitting?’

Dad angrily washed his face and hands at the battered washstand. ‘Yeah, I know, sorry George’. He patted my head, and I felt loved again. ‘It’s that jumped up bastard Twidale’, he growled. ‘You know, the one who won the fucking war in New Guinea on his own. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a bloody cook in the army, the rotten mongrel.’

Dad swore a lot, but not usually the real strong kind, just a few bloody and bastard words, to season his speech like herbs in cooking. Now he used words that I had not heard before, his face red under his dark tan. Mum was quiet; she had seen this side of him before. For whatever reason, he had not served in the armed forces during the war and he became very angry whenever the subject came up. His reaction seemed worse if people started spinning war stories, and somehow Twidale seemed to crystallise his feelings on the matter.

His attitude to the returned men was unusual because very few of the local men had served in the war, so it was not as if he were the odd man out. The farmers were all second or third generation primary producers and, as such, they were not encouraged by the government to go into the services. Food production was as important as fighting during those dark years.

‘Don’t let him get to you love’, Mum soothed. ‘There are others who want you to do work for them. Keith Simmons was here earlier today and he wants you to sew some wheat bags for him, sixpence a bag he said.’ Keith Simmons was one of a family of five brothers who owned the land next to ours; they were our neighbours on three sides. Their father, now retired but still living on one of the blocks, had pioneered the property, growing cattle and sheep. The sons had divided the large holding into separate blocks and they took one each. I think they were having difficulties getting on together and dividing the land gave them independence. They now grew mostly cereal crops, but they still co-operated on some joint projects. Between them they provided Dad with a lot of work.

My father brightened at this news. He liked sewing bags; it was a task he could perform without conscious thought, leaving his mind free to dream. And the local farmers liked his work because he filled the bags tightly with grain and the stitches never leaked when they loaded the bags on the trucks. This was an important consideration, grain was valuable, and was sold on weight. He could sew five hundred bags on a good day, so it was good money when we needed it most. Mum contemplated a good Christmas on the bag sewing money. Dad dried his hands on an old towel. ‘Good’, he scowled. ‘I told twit Twidale to repair his own shearing shed. I hope it falls down on him and all his prize rams. I’ll never do another turn of work for the toffee nosed cunt.’ He never did either, as far as I can remember. I found his words difficult to understand – I liked mister Twidale. Mum was always friendly with the family. But of course she was friendly with all of the neighbours, it was a simple matter of good business ethics. People now came to the farm almost every day to buy vegetables from her and to talk. The more of the crop she could sell directly from the garden, the less work we had to do in selling it in town.

Most of the local men were about my father’s age and, while he didn’t seem to like most of them all that much, he always made the effort to be friendly. He was by nature a very courteous man, but he often denigrated the cocky’s sons when talking privately with my mother.

‘All born with silver spoons in the mouth’, he was fond of saying. ‘Their fathers set the bastards up in the first place but most of them will balls the farms up in the end, or piss ‘em up against the wall.’ He was right to some extent. Fathers and grandfathers had set up most of the holdings originally to raise cattle and sheep. Now the new generations were clearing the scrub at an astonishing rate to grow grain, mostly wheat. They saw this as easier, cleaner and more profitable than raising livestock.

There were a few returned men about apart from Twidale. The locals discussed these men in hushed, reverent and sympathetic tones, except for my father who ignored them. The war touched most families it seemed, in some direct way. Family members lost or captured, or worse still missing in action. A returned man about the place gave an air of importance to a family, someone to admire, thus setting the family apart from those other earthy souls who had spent the war on the land in peaceful hardship.

There appeared to be a constant commitment or an unpaid debt to these men in the eyes of the community, but I suppose some of those who did not fight in the war felt they had made a different but equally important contribution. Yet somehow the returned men subordinated them, and some people, like my father who had not served, were bitter about this. I never really got close enough to him to explore the depths and reasons for his feelings on the matter. We all knew, however, that the war was a subject to leave alone when Dad was around.

Personally I was fascinated by stories about the war and I looked at the returned men in open-mouthed awe. Often as we did the vegie run, Mum would nudge my side and whisper as she pointed out some surviving hero. ‘That’s mister so and so, he’s a returned man.’ I would stare with bright lizard eyes, my active imagination conjuring up all kinds of brave acts. We kids talked about the war whenever we could, caught up as we were in the hype of post-war nostalgia. We listened to radio shows on the subject when we visited friends or relatives who owned a wireless, but not when Dad was around.

Given Dad’s disdain for the returned men and the spoiled cocky’s sons, he was something of an island in the area. Luckily his diverse range of skills made him a bit of a celebrity in his own right, which kept us on reasonable terms with the neighbours most of the time. I often thought that people looked on my family as a sort of local curiosity or a charity case deserving of all kinds of cast-offs or tins of beef- dripping and surplus milk and eggs.

I was too young to feel wounded pride or resentment at these gifts, but I could see my father’s face set whenever a benefactor came by, and he would always press a bundle of fresh produce their way to appease his ego. But whether he liked it or not, the few creature comforts we had in the house came from benevolent neighbours and Mum welcomed them without independent pride because she was more practical than Dad.

As more land fell to the bulldozers, the sheep and cattle began to disappear and wide fields of grain now waved where thick brigalow scrub had once stood. A conservationist before his time, Dad was always in two minds about the land clearing. He argued that the farmers should leave strips of connecting scrub to guard against soil erosion and to provide a refuge for the native animals.

Most of the farmers scoffed at this idea. ‘Why let the animals and birds breed so they can destroy the crops?’ They argued, reasonably from their point of view. Dad had many heated arguments with them about this, but in the end he never won. It was not his land and the government of the day had no stringent rules on the matter.

The bulldozers crawled through the scrub flattening the tall trees in their path and leaving a swathe of carnage that sometimes filled me with a kind of animal panic. But perhaps I was so close to the soil that I had become feral and joined to the earth like a native animal. Contractors carried out most of the clearing; they simply pushed down the trees and left the rest of the work to someone else. Most contractors used huge Caterpillar D8 bulldozers, but some farmers took on a lot of their own clearing with smaller units.

The Simmons’ brothers had three relatively small Fowler tractors that were dwarfed by the big Caterpillars, but they linked two of these units together with a long land clearing cable about two inches thick and assaulted the bush. The Fowlers crawled noisily through the scrub in parallel lines about thirty yards apart. One unit advanced about fifty yards ahead of the other and provided most of the pulling power. The rear unit thus acted as an ‘anchor’ that provided leverage and greatly multiplied the combined power of the units.

The long cable tore down all of the scrub in its path and we marked the progress of the operation by the wavering green treetops, the tractors hidden in the depth of the disappearing bush. When the cable came up against a large and stubborn tree, men wearing thick gloves lifted it as high as they could reach up the trunk of the tree to give it greater leverage. Smoke rose from the cable that grew hot from the friction with the tree as it worked back and forth across the trunk cutting deeply into the bark and wood.

The angry green Fowlers thumped away, scratching in the dirt like hens and billowing thick clouds of black smoke as they struggled against the cable. The third unit followed the cable and burrowed eagerly around the base of the larger and more robust trees, breaking up the roots until the tree finally succumbed and crashed to the ground. A shower of leaves, branches and the occasional displaced animal accompanied the crashing of the trees as they fell before the land clearing operations. We adopted many possums and lizards made homeless by the dozers. We could hear the Fowlers working from dawn until dark, the sound of their engines carried for miles in the otherwise quiet bush. We called them ‘puffing billies’ because of the ‘pom, pom, pom’ sound they made. These simple but effective machines had very few moving parts and could run on practically any kind of fuel.

As the scrub fell we followed the dozers and worked to clear the fallen trees from the land. This meant piling broken branches against the fallen logs and burning them. As we progressively burnt the larger logs we gathered the smaller branches and piled these around any stumps that remained. At last, after weeks of backbreaking work, the land would be ready for the first ploughing. The smell of burning logs permeated the area and the thick smoke hung in the air along the creek, lingering among the trees like dirty cobwebs. When the weather was cold and the air was heavy with moisture the smoke curled low to the ground and morning and afternoon skies burned with a splash of deep red along the horizon.

We learned to accept the discomfort caused by the heat and smoke, consoled I suppose by the money we were making from the clearing work. ‘Stick picking’ as we called this task was hard work and the rewards were not high. We were paid a pound per acre for the work, but an acre is a lot of land when one is clearing thick scrub in this manner. But land clearing meant plenty of work that Dad could do on a contract basis and therefore be his own boss. The grain crops that came later meant bag sewing around Christmas time, so he challenged his conservationist opinions every day for years as the scrub fell, torn between his ethics and his constant need for money to nurture his brood.

The clearing and the later crops meant that the growing tribe of kids could be put to work as well to earn their keep, and work we did. In the cold or the heat, almost as soon as we could walk we were performing some function. Filling bags or picking up sticks with the clearing gangs. In addition, we helped to keep some production going on the farm. Thus hard work and discomfort became our lot in life for years, our childhoods somehow stolen by adult responsibilities.

One day at dusk a ‘townie’ looking man in a shiny new car came to the farm and our sheltered minds stirred with interest and fear, because there was something sinister about this stranger in our world. He spent a lot of time in the house talking to Mum and Dad, their voices were often raised and we could hear Dad’s voice above the rest. We kids were banished to the yard and yelled at if we stuck our eager noses around the door in an effort to find out what was going on. At last a grave faced Mum and Dad escorted the townie to his car.

As the man passed by where we sat in the shadow of the house, he looked intently at the sorry collection of grubby urchins peering at him from the gloom. We stared back, frozen like rabbits caught in a spotlight. We must have looked a sight to him in our torn and patched hand-me-down clothes and our wild frightened-animal eyes. As he gazed at us I thought I saw his look change to one of sympathy and resolve.

‘Now Norm’, he said firmly, as he climbed into the car. ‘If you won’t send them to Tummaville School, and I know its four miles.’ He eyed Dad closely. ‘Then you must enrol them in the correspondence school. I’ll wait two weeks before I make out a report. This will give you both time to get them enrolled, in which case no prosecution will be actioned, understand?’ Dad and Mum simply nodded. I was amazed. Nobody ever spoke to Dad like that, but he just nodded and accepted the censure in the man’s voice. As the car drove off Dad lit a cigarette and spat angrily on the ground. ‘Your bloody sister I’ll bet’, he roared, turning on my mother. ‘That’s who dobbed us in, the bloody interfering old bitch.’

‘Now, now love, we don’t know that, he never said who it was.’ Mum soothed, rubbing his back in an effort to calm him down. ‘And anyway, the man’s right. They really should start school of some sort, let’s try the correspondence thing he talked about. We don’t need to get them all dolled up for that and it will get the government off our back.’ She was thinking no doubt of our lack of money to pay for school clothes and books. ‘And him a bloody returned man, an ex-army officer he said.’ Dad sneered, ignoring her comment. ‘Pity some Jap hadn’t lopped his bloody head off.’

He went to the shed and collected his fishing rod, dug a handful of worms from the worm-bed and tramped off to the creek, his straight back the final word on the subject for now. He often did this when he was upset. The amazing thing was that not one kid followed. The word ‘school’ had us all frozen in our tracks and not even fishing with Dad could break the spell. The thought of having our happy and simple lives cluttered up with going to school was painful to consider.

Trevor vowed that he would ‘piss orf into the scrub’ should he be thus sentenced, and the rest of us were inclined to join him. When we queried my mother on the prospects of school she gave us her stock answer, used whenever she was uncertain of something or did not want us to know the truth. ‘We’ll see’, she said. We did soon enough.