Читать книгу Down a Country Lane - Gary Blinco - Страница 15

CHAPTER SEVEN

Oft in the stilly night,

Ere slumbers chain has bound me,

Fond memory brings the light,

Of other days around me;

The smiles, the tears,

Of boyhood’s years,

The words of love then spoken;

The eyes that shone,

Now dimmed and gone,

The cheerful hearts now broken.

Thomas Moore

My father always had a vision. Unfortunately the vision was generally a moving target and was therefore never something he could run to ground; but he was always after a new idea to make money. I learned to recognise the signs of another impending scheme. When he began to sit for hours on the back steps, smoking steadily and gazing down towards the creek, I knew he was onto a plan of some kind. Dad’s ideas always brought some change and excitement to the farm and I could not wait to see what the latest project would be. I followed him eagerly into the house, as he appeared to suddenly reach some resolution, tossing his cigarette aside as he strode inside.

‘This place is not making us enough money to live a decent life’, he said to Mum as she struggled with the old foot operated sewing machine. ‘We gotta find a way to get in a few more quid.’

Mum cursed as the machine jammed yet again, breaking the precious needle. She was busy making flannelette pyjamas for the whole family as winter was fast approaching, and she was now down to her last needle for the machine. ‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked guardedly, continuing with her sewing with great caution to preserve the remaining needle – the prospect of finishing the project by hand was daunting. ‘Not dressmaking I hope, this bloody machine has almost had it and my sack bag style of sewing may not be a big seller.’

Dad looked at the few pairs of very rough and simple garments she had made so far, holding them up for a closer inspection. ‘You’re right about that much’, he said, grinning. ‘These pyjamas will be best kept covered by the bed clothes.’ He threw the offerings over the back of a chair and flopped down in the seat. ‘What I have in mind won’t involve much extra work for you and the kids, just so long as you can keep the farm going pretty much without me.’ Mum shot him a look of alarm and I caught my breath. Mum and us children did most of the work anyway, but I hoped Dad was not thinking of anything too drastic.

‘It sounds like you’re planning to join the French foreign legion or something’, Mum said. ‘Or are you going to rob the mail train?’

‘They’re both pretty good ideas, I’ll keep them in mind’, Dad said in mock seriousness. ‘But I’d like to try something a bit easier and safer as a lead up if that’s alright with you.’ I could not stand the suspense any longer. ‘What are ye gunna do Dad?’ I blurted urgently. ‘I can help, we all can, the crop in the garden is doin’ orright, we can leave it alone for a few weeks now.’ Dad grinned at me as Darryl swaggered into the house, glancing questioningly from one to the other as he propped himself momentarily against the door-jam. His thick dark brows creased, but he said nothing and came into the room to sit on the corner of the kitchen table in that placid way of his.

‘There’ll be a job for you blokes, don’t worry’, Dad said. ‘So long as your mother agrees with my idea.’ Mum cast him a frown. ‘You’re a clever bugger, aren’t you?’ She scorned. ‘I don’t even know what you are talking about, and already I’m set up to be the baddy in the story. Get to the point, for Christ’s sake.’

Dad grinned smugly, convinced that he had now built a solid base for his plan and had Mum in the right frame of mind to receive the new concept, whatever it may be. He launched into his latest idea. ‘I was talkin’ to a bloke I used to knock around with in town yesty’; he began, as Mum looked guarded again.

‘Yes’, she said slowly. ‘I saw you outside the butter factory with a bloke I didn’t know.’

Dad nodded his head affirmatively. ‘That was old Bert Nusky, he’s making a good quid cartin’ cordwood for the boiler at the butter factory’, he said. ‘At least he was, reckons he’s too bloody crook to keep on with it.’ Mum remained quiet and waited for him to go on. Dad cleared his throat as he often did when he was nervous. ‘He wants me to take over. He said he could get old Pearson, the boss at the factory, to let me take over the contract.’

‘That’s all very well love’, Mum said uncertainly, careful not to dampen his enthusiasm. ‘But aren’t you forgetting something?’ Dad looked surprised. ‘Like what?’ He asked incredulously.

Mum waved her arms in frustration. ‘Like how will you cut it, you’d need a buzz-saw wouldn’t you?’ She cried, a bit impatiently I thought. ‘How will you cart it and where will you get the wood from?’ Dad frowned, clearly put out that she could believe he had not thought of all these minor details. ‘I can set the Hupp up with a tray body’, he said. We had recently been forced to retire the Overland utility for an old German sedan called a Haupmobile. It was a pretty rare unit I think, as I had never seen another like it. The Overland now sat dejectedly under a pepper tree in Nanna Blinco’s back yard, disabled with a seized motor.

‘I’ll cut the wood with the cross cut and the axe to start with’, Dad declared bravely. ‘Merv will help me when he can and the kids can help.’ Merv was Dad’s younger brother. My father looked pleased with himself for being ahead of Mum’s questions. ‘And Doug Simmons said I can cut all the wood I like from the paddock across the road, he’s only gunna burn it anyway.’

‘Well’, Mum said, nodding in agreement. ‘You seem to have it all worked out and you all have some time on your hands. It sounds all right and there’s no extra cost, so why not give it a go. Sounds like bloody hard work but.’ She added as an afterthought.

‘That’s never bothered me before’, Dad scoffed. ‘I’ll go and have a look at the Hupp now and see how I can set it up.’ He hurried from the house followed by a tribe of interested offspring. There were now two additional children in the family, both boys. Roger, the youngest was the inevitable toddler about the farm, and Geoffrey was just reaching an age when he could become part of the labour force. With plenty of brothers and sisters on call they were well spoiled and Mum was imposed upon very little regarding their care and entertainment.

For days Dad worked on modifying the car and turning it into a utility. He removed the rectangular shaped cabin, which luckily came off in one piece after he removed a few screws and bolts. He said it would only take an hour or two to convert it back to a sedan when we needed it. With the cabin gone he removed the rear seats, exposing the bare floorboards and part of the chassis. He rigged up two hardwood runners from the remaining front seat to the rear of the unit, bolting them down to the chassis and extending them past the end of the car to create extra carrying space.

Cord wood, Dad explained to us as he worked, must be cut to exact measurements so it would fit into the firebox of the boiler at the factory. A cord was two axe handles long and one axe handle square, and the logs were to be no more than six inches thick. Pretty crude measurements, but just a good size to pack neatly onto his newly created ‘truck’. He could cart several cords in a load, he said.

Dad honed his two ‘Kelly’ axes to shining perfection and sharpened the old cross cut saw and set the teeth. As usual he sent Mum to town to set up the contract with the factory. She came home with a book of delivery vouchers that were to be handed in and signed off with each load to ensure we were paid for the wood.

Dad was set to start his new venture. He threw himself into cutting the wood and we could hear his axe ringing through the bush from dawn until dark every day for weeks. Mum sent us over to the paddock three times a day with his morning and afternoon smoko’s and his lunch. He was easy to find, we simply went towards the sound of his ringing axe. He would be reluctant to stop and eat and we squatted on dry, fallen logs, or climbed into the lower branches of shady trees to watch him work. I admired Dad with proud envy as he worked. His dark skin was a bright sheen of sweat and the muscles in his arms and back rippled as he swung the axe with expert precision, the blade biting deeply and accurately into the dry wood.

At every swing of the axe Dad gave forth a grunting sound. ‘Huff, huff, huff’, he went, for swing after swing. I tried to imitate this sound as I used the spare axe, but I could never see the benefit of it and cutting the dry wood was too hard for my under developed arms. Dad said the huffing helped him hit harder, but perhaps it helped his breathing after all the smoking he did. Soon he had a steady stream of loads going to the factory and the money began to flow and be evident from the abundance of food on the table and new clothes on our backs.

Weeks later, Darryl and I were helping Dad deliver a load of wood to town when one of the wooden spoked rear wheels of the Hupp collapsed under the burden of the wood. I think Dad had progressively increased the load to expedite the transporting process and the old car finally succumbed. After all, it was never designed to cope with the work we were giving it. We were not hurt as we had just left the paddock and we were only moving at walking pace. Dad cursed rather badly as we ground to a halt in a cloud of dust, sending a large part of the load spewing onto the narrow dirt road.

‘Now wouldn’t that fuck ya!’ He hissed, climbing quickly from the truck to inspect the damage. He stood back scratching his head for a moment and twirling his battered felt hat around his finger as he studied the fractured wheel. ‘We better unload the rest of it boy’, he said to Darryl. ‘George, you light a fire and boil the billy, we’ll need a drink of tea while we try and fix the wheel.’ I quickly obeyed his instructions while they unloaded the unit and painstakingly commenced the repairs.

It was hot there beside the narrow gravel road and our shirts clung with sticky irritation to our skin as we worked. Showers of birds moved among the trees above our heads and beyond the canopy of green, the blue summer sky was endless behind a few fleecy white clouds. I sat and watched the billy hissing on the fire and took in the haunting beauty of the bush with its splash of colourful shrubs and wildflowers, and the moving display of birds and butterflies. I don’t think Dad or Darryl even noticed the peaceful surroundings as they toiled with clanking tools and muttered curses. A tractor and plough worked in a paddock across the road, too far off to hear the motor; its image ghostly in the shimmering haze as it dragged a cloud of dust around the field.

Dad’s skill with his hands always amazed me and he soon had the wheel back together and returned to the truck. ‘We better not put the load back on ‘er boys’, he said thoughtfully. ‘I think the old girl’s days as a truck are over.’ Darryl looked surprised as he glanced at the pile of wood, then at Dad and the makeshift truck. ‘But what about the wood?’ he asked, uncharacteristically verbose. ‘We can’t just leave it, somebody will pinch it. And there’s a lot more cut back in the paddock too.’

‘Don’t worry boy’, Dad said quietly, rubbing Darryl on the back. ‘I’ll find another truck, one that can cope with the load. Let’s stack the wood off to the side of the road, then get on home before it gets too dark, the headlights are nilly buggered on this old girl as well.’

Dad must have been doing quite well out of the cordwood because he decided to restore the Hupp to its car state. He went off to an auction somewhere and came home with an old 1929 Chev-six truck. It was a mere bare chassis with half of the cabin missing, but Dad soon had it set up with new boards on the tray and a rebuilt cabin. His carpentry and mechanical skills really came in handy at times. We were now a ‘two vehicle family’, and Mum was very happy to have her own car and the independence it offered. It also allowed her to take Dad his meals as he worked cutting the cordwood, thus saving us from the regular treks through the scrub with the heavy tucker-box.

For the next few months we toiled through whatever hours of daylight nature provided, working the old Chev truck and ourselves hard. While Dad and I carted the loads of wood into town, Darryl worked like a navvy with the axe to cut more wood. He was becoming solid and muscular and could now almost match Dad’s skill with the axe. The load vouchers for the wood ran out and typically Dad did not bother to ask for more while we were at the factory. Instead he sent Mum off to town in the Hupp to get another set.

When she returned to where Dad and I were loading another shipment of wood I saw that she was in tears. Brokenly she explained how the factory had enough wood for the next two years, the boss said. After that time they were changing over to an electric boiler. He thought Dad knew there was only to be the one set of vouchers.

Now we had several loads of wood cut that we could not sell. ‘That old bastard Nusky’, Dad spat angrily. ‘No wonder he was so happy to get out of it.’ He sat habitually scratching his head and twirling his hat for a while. ‘Ah well’, he said at last, standing up and rubbing his back. ‘We got the truck out of it, and we can use the wood at home. C’mon George, let’s get the last load on, you better run over and tell Darryl to stop chopping.’

I ran off across the dry paddock to where Darryl slaved over a log under a cloud of bush-flies, to break the news. ‘Dad said to stop choppin’’, I yelled as I approached. ‘The factory don’t want no more wood, Mum’s bawlin’ about it.’ Darryl stopped chopping gratefully and sat on the log and inspected his blistered hands. ‘Bloody good thing too’, he said, pulling off his sweat-soaked shirt to reveal his finely tuned torso. ‘I was gettin’ sick of it. Mum’ll be orright, we can get back to gardenin’, I like that better.’ That was a long speech for Darryl, which suggested how much he had come to hate the cord wood business.

As we joined Mum and Dad near the truck the rest of the kids were swarming over the pile of wood like ants disturbed from their nest, quickly loading the old unit. Dad was suddenly very cheerful as he called instructions; I think he was sick of the wood business too. Mum just shook her head. Dad got over disappointments quickly and usually found a silver lining. I remembered how a few months before we had split hundreds of fence posts for a cocky. The work completed Dad found the farmer could not pay us. Dad simply brought the posts home and eventually sold them to other local farmers. The process took months and he was forced to sell at discounted prices, making little money out of the exercise when we really needed it. As with this latest disaster, Dad had simply taken it in his stride.

Now that the cord wood business had expired Dad needed something else to challenge his talents and he began to talk about breeding chooks. We always had a few ‘house fowls’, but Dad now contemplated something on a larger more commercial scale. He read an article in one of his old poultry farmer’s journals that inspired him. The article detailed how an enterprising person with a little land and a lot of patience could take day old chicks from infancy to table size and make a killing in the market. Dad said people were desperate for white meat on the table because most of them were thoroughly sick of mutton.

‘Fowl’ as it he called it, was very expensive and reserved for the tables of the well to do. Those people, who ate ‘fowl’, were most likely consuming one of the ‘house fowls’, which had ceased to lay. This would be a dry and tough old bird and would probably be disguised in a stew. Dad’s plan was to breed plump, tender young birds that would command a good price.

Excited, inspired and with a little cash left over from the cord wood venture, my father wrote off to somewhere and ordered one hundred ‘day old chicks’, to be delivered to Yandilla railway siding in two weeks time. Meanwhile, he set about building, from intricate instructions contained in one of his poultry books, a ‘brooder’, to house and nurture the chicks when they arrived. For days, with the enthusiastic support of us all, he cut, snipped and hammered as this strange contraption took shape on the back verandah. The shed had no spare room for him to complete the project; besides, he said the chicks needed to be kept inside for a while so he could keep an eye on them.

One end of the brooder looked like a miniature bird aviary; enclosed in fine wire-mesh it was about six feet long, by three feet wide and two feet high. The other end was completely enclosed with flat iron and wallboard. A low curtain, made from an old blanket, covered the entry between the run and the coop. This allowed the chicks to move out to exercise and to feed from the little troughs that Dad had made for them.

He made a heating system from a kerosene lamp placed on a stand at the hutch end of the brooder. The glass of the lamp sat under the end of a piece of galvanised down pipe, which traversed the roof of the brooder. Hot air from the lamp provided heat to the downpipe, thus keeping the chicks cosy and warm, as it was winter at the time.

He set up this contrivance on the back verandah in the middle of our makeshift bathroom to await the arrival of the chicks. Delving rather deeply into our dwindling cash reserves, he made several trips to town to collect bags of bran, pollard and something he called ‘fowl mash’. The latter was not made as I had supposed, from squashed fowls, but from finely cracked grain of some kind. He also bought bottles of a fish emulsion called hypol. This potion smelled of rotten fish but it would ward off all known diseases to fowls, or so he said.

Thus prepared for the arrival of the chicks he surprised us by going to the next stage, by thoroughly renovating and enlarging the fowl run that stood about fifty yards from the house. By the time he was finished it looked a bit like a larger version of the brooder. Dad said that some of the chicks would be females and would thus become designated as ‘layers’. And as a result they would enjoy a long and fruitful life. Those unfortunate enough to be born male would be fattened and sold for the table, their lives short but cruelly focussed.

My mother persuaded him to complete the second stage by somehow securing the building material from one of the neighbours in return for some of her prized vegetables. I think she knew that he may lose interest in the project before its completion and she did not want a hundred fully grown fowls running wild and attacking the revenue producing crops in the garden.

Dad prepared to go the six miles to the railway siding to collect the chicks and my excitement reached fever pitch. There were many tears, mostly mine, when only Darryl was allowed to smugly board the truck to go on this exciting journey. ‘Don’t blubber you lot’, Dad soothed. ‘I gotta leave some room in the truck for the chicks, we won’t be long, then you can all have a nurse of a chick.’ This prospect appeased us for the time being.

Dad lit the heating lamp, placed food in the feeder troughs, and fresh well ‘hypoled’ water in the water containers before they set off. The unlucky younger set sat back for the almost unbearable wait for their return. It seemed like hours later, but was probably about two, when we heard the old truck grinding up the lane and across the gully. We ran outside and saw the feeble headlamps creeping towards the house, it was by now quite dark and our patience was almost exhausted. Mum held us at bay, as Dad and Darryl unloaded the cheeping boxes of chicks. Dad looked glum. ‘Poor little buggers must have arrived yesty’, he growled. ‘Some of ‘em have died in the cold.’

Yandilla was an unmanned siding and there were no telephones, at least not in our house, so the railways could not advise us of the arrival of our consignment of chicks. Mum simply sighed in that resigned way she had as we released the chicks from the boxes into the brooder. I think about twenty of the hundred were dead, or near it. I was more interested in the fluffy little yellow creatures that remained alive. Free of the boxes at last, they cheeped softly as they enjoyed the open area of the brooder. They fell on the food and water with relish, half starved from their long wait at the siding. We all wanted to hold a chick or two, but soon gave up on the idea when Mum started cuffing ears. ‘Don’t handle the poor little buggers, there have been enough casualties already’, she declared.

That night the constant cheeping of the chicks and the musty smell of them on the verandah made if difficult for me to sleep, and my initial excitement receded. Within a few weeks those chicks who had survived the cold, the kids and the cats, were repatriated to the ‘big pen’, to continue their growth. About sixty of the original hundred made it to adolescence, and about half of these were female. Many of these survivors began to appear in the domestic cooking pot before maturity because we were once again in a ‘bad patch’, as my mother called it. We usually were, more or less. By now Dad had lost interest in poultry farming for fun and profit and Mum took over and nurtured the fowls into a productive period. We soon had a good supply of eggs and a plump young rooster for the table when we needed one.

We were now ready to market some of our birds and Mum sent Dad out into the lanes with a message to anyone who was interested that she could now supply dressed roosters as well as fresh vegetables. The word spread and we had a steady stream of happy customers visiting the farm. One day in the middle of a hot fly-stung summer a new Ford Customline purred timidly up the dirt drive and drew up in front of the shed. A well-dressed man got out of the car and Mum greeted him at the front gate under the little trellis. ‘Hello’, she said. ‘Are you after some vegies or some dressed roosters?’

The man looked askance at the grubby kids, as he appeared to take in the run down old house and the derelict farm. ‘Well, I heard you had some fresh roosters’, he said rather haughtily, with the emphasis on the ‘fresh’ I thought. ‘Tell me’, he continued. ‘Where do you butcher the roosters? Do you have some kind of refrigeration?’ Mum shook her head and coloured brightly at the questions; I felt a stab of anger and glowered at this impertinent man. ‘We don’t have a fridge’, Mum said slowly. ‘But we only kill in the cool of the day.’

The stranger sniffed. ‘I see’, he said warily. ‘And do you have any roosters prepared at this moment?’ He watched Mum closely, waiting for her reply.

‘Why yes, I happen to have a few ready’, she said, falling into his trap. ‘How many do you want?’ She forced a wane smile.

‘It’s the middle of the afternoon on a blasted hot day Madam’, the stranger growled. ‘How could the birds possibly be fresh?’ He sighed deeply as Mum was lost for a reply. ‘Ah well’, he hissed. ‘I can’t waste a trip. Please catch me five of your fattest live birds, I’ll have the cook butcher them properly. Unfortunately I have no other choice; my banker is joining us for dinner tonight.’ Mum reddened again but dispatched Darryl and I to catch the roosters. We were both fuming as we looked for the skinniest birds we could find. ‘I don’t like that bastard’, Darryl growled through the haze of flies about his head, his eyes hard in his grimy face.

‘Me neither’, I agreed. ‘Let’s get the skinny ones, you know the ones that were crook.’ He grinned. ‘Bloody oath, I hope they make him crook as a dog and his banker with him’. We crammed five roosters in a cardboard box with a few holes punched in the sides so they could breathe, we did not want him to look too closely at our selection. I was pleased to see that Mum had sold the stranger a good selection of vegetables when we returned with the birds. He paid for the produce without question, and I grinned when I saw that Mum had inflated her prices considerably.

As the big car eased out the gate Mum flopped on the front steps and cried a little. ‘The bastard’, she sobbed. ‘I know he’s right, but what can I do about it? We don’t have any ‘fridge and the place looks a sight.’ She looked sadly around the farmyard that suddenly seemed littered with rubbish. Darryl was still fighting mad and his anger increased when he saw how upset Mum was. ‘Up his stuck up arse’, he said hotly. ‘Let’s just sell the bloody things alive, if it’s good enough for that toffee nosed prick, it’s good enough for anybody.’

‘Yeah Mum’, I joined in, sitting close to her and embracing her shoulders. ‘Then we won’t have to clean the buggers unless somebody asks us to. And while Darryl and me catch the roosters you can flog ‘em some vegies, it worked with that mongrel.’ Mum hugged us both. ‘What would I do without you pair’, she said, kissing our cheeks. ‘And you’re right, I got a good price for that lot, look.’

She spread the coins and notes out on the top step. ‘And we’ll have the ones you killed yesterday for supper tonight. Like you said Darryl - up his arse.’ Cheerful again she went inside the house as we set to work on our regular chores. There was plenty of good nourishment available for the fowls, as long as the garden produced a crop. They thrived on the waste vegetables that we fed them and we also had a good supply of grain, illicitly obtained from Dad’s bag sewing work.

Dad’s animal husbandry projects never seemed to become much of a commercial success, due either to a lack of funding, perseverance or capital, and usually a combination of all these things. But they always left a worthwhile residue to the family. At the least we benefited from the additions to our diet.

We had sold most of the roosters and I wondered if Dad would order another lot of chicks, but he appeared to have lost interest. I was disappointed as I fed the few remaining birds, there were barely enough left to supply our own needs for eggs and table fowls. I thought of trying to breed some chicks, I knew you only needed a rooster and a hen but that was the extent of my expertise. I was too ignorant to know exactly how to approach the project, and too embarrassed to ask Mum or Dad.

Darryl joined me at the chook house with an armful of freshly cut thistles. As he tossed the greens to the hungry fowls, I broached the subject of breeding our own. ‘How do you make the chooks get chicks?’ I asked. ‘Dad ain’t gunna buy no more chicks, so I reckon we should try an’ make our own.’ Darryl creased his brows and stared hard at me. ‘Shit, you don’t know do ya?’ he said in a patronising voice. ‘Well, we just bung one of the roosters from the other pen in with the hens and let him root ‘em all. Then the old hens just sit on the eggs until the chicks come out, it’s easy.’

‘How do you know? An’ what’s rootem mean?’ I persisted. I did not like his superior tone. ‘Pop told me, you know the chicks he got, well he made them himself,’ Darryl explained, his tone softening as he saw my flush of anger. ‘But Pop’s are only bloody bantams, they ain’t no good fer nuthin.’ Encouraged, I thought I would risk another question.

‘What does rootem mean but?’ Darryl laughed long and hard at this, rolling about on the ground. ‘You know, like Mum and Dad do all the time and she keeps havin’ more kids.’ Now it was my turn to colour a bit as I remembered how we sometimes watched my parents coupled together on the bed when they thought we were all asleep. The chooks seemed to lack some of the basic equipment, but I dared not risk another question. To demonstrate his point, Darryl selected the largest rooster and released it into the hen house. It attacked the hens with gusto, mounting several in rapid succession. I stood and watched in amazement as the eager rooster pounced on the hens, most of whom seemed to enjoy the experience, despite the torn and bleeding combs the rooster left mangled on their heads.

After about half an hour we captured the quivering rooster and returned him to his own pen, exhausted by his workout. He appeared to be the envy of the rooster coop after that. ‘We’ll get a different one next time.’ Darryl mused as he saw the obvious envy among the roosters, his sense of fair play showing through. ‘We can put one with the hens every arvo for a while, but don’t tell the old man.’

A few days later Dad arrived home late in the afternoon with two bony, nondescript cows, as part payment for some task he had performed. Suddenly we were in the dairy farming business and he was on another roll, his eyes bright with the prospect of joining the moneyed cockies at last. Mum called at the butter factory in Millmerran and they presented us with a three-gallon cream can, duly endorsed with a somewhat pretentious title, given the size of our holding. The proud words proclaimed:

‘EASTVILLE YANDILLA’

I was bursting with pride and expectation as Darryl and I took it in turns to rise early each day to round up and milk the two cows. I liked plodding alone over the white frosty grass with nothing on my mind but the shit matted behinds of the cows in front of me. I walked through the lazy moist dawn, watching the bush come alive with colour and birdsong. The sun rose in a golden haze above the tree line and a gentle mist steamed over the creek as the first sunbeams kissed the surface of the water. I wondered what this place would have been like a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, and decided that it would probably have been pretty much the same. It took little imagination to see a tribe of aborigines standing around smokey fires near the pump hole on the cusp of day, feasting on fish that had been roasted in the coals. Quiet, content and at one with nature.

One of the cows bawled loudly as it strolled along, breaking the daydream and bringing me back to the present with a jolt. I looked up and saw the old house squatting in the mist with the sun on the roof. I grinned as I realised we were pretty close to the earth ourselves.

It was a good season with plenty of sweet green grass about the farm and along the lanes so the cows gave a bountiful supply of rich milk. Somehow my mother had ‘borrowed’ an old hand operated cream separator from one of the local farmers who had gone out of the dairy business. I fought my brothers and sisters for a turn at winding the handle of the separator, the novelty of it overpowering the fact that it was hard work to operate the thing. We all watched with delight as the cream came rich and yellow from one of the spouts and the white skimmed milk came frothing from another.

After a week of milking the two old cows every morning and night the cream can was full of bright yellow cream. I went with Mum to deliver our first shipment of cream to the factory. Mum said the money for the cream would be a welcome addition to the vegetable run money. The manager of the factory was a large fat man named Otto; I remembered his name from the cord wood venture. He came out to welcome Mum with her first delivery, reaching into the can and dipping his chubby finger into the cream. ‘Good cream Grace’, he said, smacking his lips, I could see why he was so fat. ‘What sort of a fridge have you got, seeing you will probably only deliver once a week?’

Mum silenced me with a quick look. ‘Oh just the old kero job you know’, she lied beautifully. ‘But it does the job, specially in this cold weather.’ Otto slapped her back and rubbed my head.

‘That’s all you need, just as long as you can keep it cold. Well, all the best, I got a lot of work to do.’ He waddled off into the inner rooms of the factory as Mum winked at me. I wondered how anyone so fat could work at all.

Luckily it was winter at the time so the cream had not spoiled, but the incident took the edge off the enterprise. Getting up at dawn to milk the cows, especially in the winter, proved a painful chore, and the gloss soon waned from the dairying business. We made a few more deliveries, but the cows were soon milked but once a day, usually in the afternoon, serving our domestic needs only. The fresh milk while it lasted was wonderful, and we had milk drinks and puddings every day.

We now had chooks, a couple of cows and the garden, so when Dad came home with five mangy pigs I thought we had really arrived in the world of mixed farmers. ‘Where did you get them?’ Mum asked as she covered her ears against the loud squeals of the terrified animals. ‘And where are you going to put them?’ Dad struggled to contain the pigs in the small crate he had borrowed from somewhere as it threatened to lift clear off the truck as the pigs struggled noisily for their freedom. ‘Old Bill Caldicott gave them to me, he didn’t have the money to pay me for the new gates I made for him, the old fart, so I accepted the pigs instead. I’ve always wanted to have a go at pigs.’

Mum shook her head and laughed. ‘And my second question, where are you goin’ to keep the bloody things? You’re not letting them in the house except on a plate with an apple in their mouths.’

‘They can camp in the rooster’s pen for a few days until I build a little sty. C’mon you boys, help me get them into the pen before it gets dark. You little kids go and pull a few lettuce and stuff for ‘em, it’ll calm ‘em down.’ Mum grabbed the smaller children in tow. ‘Come and I’ll show you what you can pick for them’, she said. ‘Feed them my good crop and your father’ll have to calm me down.’

Next day we built a sty for the pigs using palings split from iron bark logs and erected between posts with a lace of fencing wire. We buried the palings a few inches into the dark soil because Dad said pigs were mad diggers and would try and burrow out of the pen if they got half a chance. They squealed in protest as we carried them to their new home, their eyes wild like steers in a killing yard. When they were all safely in the pen we served them a feed of grain and sat on the top of the fence posts to watch them eat greedily from the rough trough made from half a hollow log.

The pigs finished the food and then stood back to stare at us with their bright, pink intelligent little eyes. They looked at the now empty trough and grunted sullenly, then they inspected every inch of the paling fence and grunted some more, as if to say ‘keep us well fed or we’ll bust out of this shoddy pen.’ Darryl and I now had one further chore to attend to each day in caring for the demanding animals. Three of the five made good their unspoken threat and escaped within a few weeks by burrowing under the fence of the sty. Dad fumed when one of our neighbours shot them as wild feral pigs when they were caught destroying crops, but there was nothing he could do about it.

The couple that survived Mum ordered slaughtered or returned to the original owner. Dad’s reluctance to butcher anything prevailed and we returned them to the farmer. Dad came home quite pleased after returning the pigs. He had managed to collect the wages he was due, minus the cost of the pigs that had been shot. Darryl winked at me across the tea table as Dad told the story, we were glad to be rid of the pigs.