The Barren Branch



Willy (left) and John Burton McGovern

      "Oh, don't be Uncle Willy!" was an expression I occasionally heard from my mother, as an alternative to, "Don't be silly!" But, obviously such a rhyming slang expression could have originated only in a family which had a real Uncle Willy.
     For some reason, I never heard Mum refer much to her uncles and aunts on the Dennis side. Perhaps, because they were mostly older than her father, she did not have much connection with them. Nevertheless, when I pressed her, she was able to list their spouses and most of their many offspring in glorious detail. She related, for example, how her Uncle James (1867 - 1938) had the unfortunate inability to find wives of sufficient longevity. After nine years, and six children, his first wife died on him. A few years later, he married a second wife, who gave him two extra offspring, and then also died on him. Finally, in old age, he took insurance against a lengthy widowerhood: he married a beautiful widow 30 years his junior. But the following year, she done died on him too. But he still managed to avoid a lengthy widowerhood, because the following year, he too shuffled off his mortal coil.
     The McGovern side of the family was a different matter. I am afraid I heard very little about their life in England. There is a story about Grandma as a girl going for a walk and finding a dog struggling to get out of the water. She pleaded with a passing gentleman to let her use his walking stick to assist it, but he refused. Ultimately, if my memory is correct, she used her own umbrella for the purpose.
     Captain McGovern's sister, Ellen was married to William DeCosta, whom we met as ship's cook in the last chapter. My grandmother apparently didn't get on well with her; she always referred to her as "Mrs DeCosta". Her brother, the Captain, used to say that she was the sort of woman who would not leave a burning house unless her hair was done that way she wanted it. In those days, men wore detachable collars, because they were the one part of a shirt which got dirty quickly, whereas the rest of the garment could be worn several times (in a cool climate such as England's). Instead of getting her own son's collars washed and starched, she found it easier to send for those of her brother's sons, for the McGovern family had a washerwoman to do the laundry. She had a small son who would come in after school and stay with his mother until she went home. He would always get a slice of bread and jam from from great-grandmother, just as did her own children when they returned from school. The washerwoman later had another baby, but it did not last long. As I said before, life was precarious for children in the bad old days.
     You must understand that, in this period, it was common for middle class families to have servants who did not live in, as did those of the upper class, but came in once or twice a week to do their tasks. And thereby hangs a tale. The two eldest McGovern children, Willy and Ada had tickets for a special children's variety show in 1883, but the nurse/nanny who was meant to escort them failed to show up. They must have been bitterly disappointed. Their chagrin would have been short-lived, however, when they learned that they had also missing the debacle at the end of the show, which became notorious as the Great Victoria Hall Disaster, in which 189 children perished. But among the bodies removed from the crush was that of their cousin, Louis, son of William and Ellen DeCosta. As he later described it:

I was picked up out of the Mass and laid among the dead. My parents were part of the excited crowd looking for their little ones among the dead. The maimed and the dying, some had one to lose, some two or three, some even four. One of the doctors in some way felt that there was a spark of life left in my little frame. I was rushed to the hospital where before long I fully recovered much to the amazement of many and the joy of my parents. In the list of the Dead, published in connection with the disaster the name of Louis De Costa still remains. [It is not on the list I read.] Death was cheated of me that time and seems to have borne a grudge against me ever since.

     Indeed, Louis was to cheat death many times again, in a career quite as adventurous as his uncle's, first as a seaman, and later as a diver in British Columbia, where that side of the family still resides. How do I know this? Well, the previous chapter on Captain McGovern was also published on my home blog, and one of Louis' descendents - a distant cousin - found it when researching his own ancestors, and contacted me. Isn't the internet wonderful?

     But I digress. Not only did Mum have much greater contact with the McGoverns, but unlike the Dennises, they were indifferent breeders. Clarrie, with her nine children, was the exception, of course - but she married a Dennis.  John Burton, the middle McGovern, begot two daughters. And that was all.
     As for Ada, whose photograph as an old lady graced my mother's room as long as my memory ran, she married a widower called Tom Alexander. Here is a photo of their wedding, apparently at home, and not taken by a professional. The happy couple are on the right. Ada's youngest sister, Norah is standing next to her. The father of the bride, Capt McGovern is standing on the left, in front of the post. The little girl in front is my Aunt Olga, while the little girl peering out at the back is my mother. Their father, Alf Dennis is the man with the moustache at the far left.
     The photo has been printed as a postcard, and I shall quote the message verbatim:

The 'appy pare & others. Seems a good old sort & has made Alex's home very comfortable. Got to go & toil so farewell  Love from Tom.

     Update: I have just received a letter from my Aunt Hilda, the last surviving member of the family, now almost 89, and shall quote it verbatim.

     I think Aunt Ada said she did the catering for her own wedding. I thought she had cooked the corned beef (?) in the copper [ie the big vat used for washing clothes]. I wish she was still around so that I could verify that. There must have been other food to eat as well. It is correct, though, that the wedding took place in Uncle Willy's shed. It would have been quite new then and very presentable for a country wedding.
     Your mother, as a little girl, was at the wedding. She said that at the wedding reception, when the speeches were made and the guests rose for a toast then resumed their seats it was just like a flock of galahs feeding along the roadside. If you have ever studied galahs feeding you would realise that it was a very apt description.

Ada

    Unfortunately, Tom and Ada's only child, a boy, was stillborn. Nevertheless, Ada let it be known that any nephew or grand-nephew named after her husband would not be forgotten in her will. However, my own first middle name is Thomas, and as far as I can see, it never did me any good at all. Also, one of the little Dennis girls - I think it was Aunt Lil - used to stay with them a lot, and it was seriously suggested that the Alexanders might, well, take care of her permanently - perhaps even adopt her. They didn't actually offer to buy her, but they did indicate that the family might be economically convenienced by the changeover. But ultimately, the parents said no.
     "Why didn't you let me go?" asked Lil when she was older, not because she was sorry it didn't happen, but because she knew she would not have minded at the time.
     "Oh," said her father,"you just don't give away one of your children."
     "I always thought," sighed Ada, "that I would get one of Clarrie's children."

Ada, aged 18 (top), Clarinda, aged 11 (left) and Norah (8)
probably taken just before they left for Australia.

    Willy and Norah, the oldest and the youngest of the family, never married. Willy had gone to sea as a midshipman, but he found the ship's captain very strict. No doubt he was just a perfectly normal captain, but Willy, as the eldest in the family, didn't like the discipline, so when they returned to shore, he took his sea chest and decamped. Would you believe! The ship was lost on the next  voyage. So Willy came back alive, but with two keepsakes from his days at sea: a couple of spots near his thumb from an incipient tattoo which his father forbade him to continue, and an ability to beautifully darn his socks, for the ship's captain had insisted they do it.
    You will remember it he who was sent out to set up the homestead in the first place at the age of 19. "I sacrificed myself for my family," he declared. It wasn't the only sacrifice he made. At one stage he was courting a girl called May, who also had a rival suitor in the person of one George Seary. Apparently, Willy decided that he himself had fewer prospects and - who knows? - perhaps he was getting tired of the girl, for he took George aside and told him, "You step in; I'll step out." But it seems May continued to have feelings for him. My cousin Christine remembers how, when she was a child, she and her Aunt Olga were returning from a visit to Norah's when they stopped in at the Seary family store at Currawarna. Suddenly, a heavily made-up May Seary ran up to Olga with the cry of, "Willy's niece!" and gave her a hug.
     But although his career as a farmer took off to a bad start, it must have turned out well. When he was forty-something, he had an operation for appendicitis, took stock of himself, and determined that he had enough money to last him the rest of his life, and so he retired.
     There is a reason why the word, "avuncular" - like an uncle - has entered the English language. Most people have fond childhood memories of their uncles and aunts, especially those who have no children of their own, for the obvious reason that they are not responsible for the children's discipline, and so can afford to indulge them. As teenagers, my mother, along with her brothers, Alf and Halley, would go over and stay several days at a time with their Uncle Willy, hoping that Grandfather would be away when they arrived. Willy would buy them chocolates and other indulgences, and let them get away with anything - even smoking his good meerschaum pipes. My mother, who was never otherwise known to smoke, managed to consume 2½ pipefuls of his tobacco, and claimed it failed to make her sick.
     Willy eventually left his entire estate, which included the farm, "Park Terrace", all bank accounts, and furniture, to Margaret and Marion, the daughters of his brother, Jack McGovern. Apparently, however, arrangements had been made for her to continue in the house for the remainder of her life, although the profits from the rent of the farmland went to the estate.

     Norah herself also had a romance, which failed at the engagement stage, and my cousin Jan, Halley's daughter now has the wedding dress. Willy and Norah whiled out their latter days at Park Terrace, brother and sister, an old bachelor and an old maid together. It was Willy who did the cooking - and 'most everything else. He once offered to pay Norah to act as housekeeper, but she declined because it would mean she would have to work, and Norah was lazy.
     However, as this blog is about The Way Things Used to Be, I shall describe in detail my impressions as a boy of my two visits to Great Aunt Norah's place.
     For a start, it existed in two parts: a kitchen/dining room, and the living quarters. My cousin in Melbourne, Christine, described Governor La Trobe's Cottage as "like Aunt Norah's place done up". Very done up, in comparison. The kitchen/dining room featured a sign which I remember verbatim:

Tobacco not allowed on Park Terrace.
Alcohol not allowed on Park Terrace.
Cards not allowed on Park Terrace.

     But what our elders did find in that room was an ancient phonograph, complete with its big trumpet, and next to it, a box containing a record. They read it out: "Who Will Care for Mother Now?" The title stuck in my memory, and left me wondering, but I had to wait another half century, and for the rise of the internet, before I could discover the lyrics.
     And now I shall make a wide digression, because this blog will, hopefully, be read by young people long after it is published, and they will want to know The Way Things Used to Be. Most people born before the turn of this century will be aware that, before there were CDs, there were tapes, and before there were tapes, there were records. But many of them will never have seen a record or, if they have, have never seen one played. A record was a flat disc - which is why the professional who played them was called a DJ, or "disc jockey" (not because he plays compact discs). The disc was inscribed with a continuous spiral groove starting from the outer perimeter, and moving into the centre. You placed the record on a turnstyle, switched on the power, and the disc began to revolve. A needle, or "stylus" dropped down onto the record, and was caught up in the groove. But the groove was not uniform in depth, but continually varied, and as the stylus moved over the hills and valleys of the groove, it produced the desired sound.
     Records was sold in a cardboard sleeve, or envelope, embellished with the title of the song. However, since a record could be grooved on both sides, the artiste would record some secondary song on the "flip side" (you may have heard the term) just for the sake of completeness. Occasionally, the singer was most surprised to discover that the flip side song had become a greater hit than the main song. Such was the case of Slim Dusty's "The Pub With No Beer", which was on the flip side of "Saddle Boy", which is mostly forgotten, except by afficionados.
     By the time I started collecting records in 1970 (and assumed they were here to stay), they were made of vinyl, which rendered them flexible, and almost unbreakable. But earlier records were made of a hard, brittle plastic, which would shatter if dropped. You've probably heard the expression, "sounding like a broken record", but have never had the experience of listening to a broken record. Well, a broken record cannot be played. What they mean is a scratched record. A shallow scratch will produce static, as the stylus moves over it at every turn. But a deep scratch will catch the stylus. It cannot get past the scratch, but is "stuck in the groove" (another expression from that time) and, as the disc revolves, plays the same phrase over again ... and over again ... and over again.
     Well, such were the records I knew and loved - although I never possessed any as a child. But Aunt Norah's record was a cylinder. I had never heard of such a thing. I had never imagined such a thing could exist. It must have entered the home during the 19th century. Nevertheless, although the Wikipedia article says they ceased production in 1929, my Aunt Hilda (born 1925) remembers the Dennis household possessing one during her younger days - powered by batteries, or a kerosene generator, of course. Playing back my tapes of Mum's memories, I realised that she had also mentioned this. It turned out that Clarrie had purchased the phonograph from Willy. It came with a packing case of cylinders, but they broke easily. Mum reported that her mother then bought an Edison phonograph just before the Second World War, and that it came with unbreakable cylinders. That strikes me as a bit unlikely, but so be it. In any case, the spring got broken when the grandchildren came and mucked around with it. "Mum, why did you let them do it?" my own mother asked. "They do it behind my back," she replied. And so I, who was one of the later cluster of grandchildren, never got to hear or see it.

     But enough of this long digression! Returning to the living/dining room of Park Terrace, the feature which struck me most was the clutter, disorder, and dirt. Housework was obviously not Norah's forte. And the cats! They roamed all over the premises, and their faces were disfigured with sores. Then my brother and I crossed to the other section of the house, and wandered into a bedroom. Out of charity to the householder, I will assume it was not her own room, but a spare bedroom. On the wall above the bedstead hung a painting of a style which is difficult to describe, but which appeared to be popular in Victorian times. It depicted the famous story of Pope Gregory the Great finding some Anglo-Saxon youths in the slave market, and declaring they were "Not Angles, but Angels". But the bed! It was covered with feathers, and there were chickens roosting on the bedstead.
     "Not doubt about it," commented my Uncle Alf. "If she were alive several hundred years ago, and her neighbours' chickens started dying, she'd have been burnt as a witch, as sure as fate."
     And Great-aunt Norah herself? "Come again soon, Harold," she said, as the family was about to depart. Our Uncle Harold (we knew him as "Halley") was her favourite; the rest of us didn't matter. But Harold himself was the one who had a genuine affection for the old lady, and nobody really objected when she left all her property, including her money, jewellery, and her father's house at Coolamon, to him. But by devious means, the albums with the 600-odd postcards the Captain sent her during the early days of the century ended up in my mother's hands, and now they are in mine.
     But I wonder what happened to the phonograph and the cylinder record. [But see the Addendum, below.]

Now let's read about the animals in the next chapter, or go back to the index.

Addendum: Again, my Aunt Hilda has provided further information, much of which I have included in the text. However, I shall use this section to quote her words on the gramophone:
     The old cylinder gramophone? I remember one at home when I was very young. [Hilda was born in 1925. Norah and Willy were still alive at the time.] Apparently Mum bought it from Uncle Willy? That could be so. I remember it as a small box with a winder on the side. What happened to it? I suspect it ended up in brother Jack's place. He had a fascination for such things.
     Later, probably just before the war, my mother bought a "Sonora" gramophone. It was a very attractive, highly polished piece of furniture when the lid was closed. It stood on four curved legs and had the same manual winder on the side. My mother gave it to Hazel [Olga's daughter] when she was a teenager. It ended up in Melbourne.
     I think you might be confusing this gramophone with the first wireless (radio) that Mum bought. It was definitely in three parts.

The Age of the Horse

     "Isn't anybody interested in the horses?" We were sitting in the restaurant in the local tavern, when the question was raised, for while my wife and I had been consulting the menu, my mother, who was already suffering from dementia, had been watching the races on the tavern television.
      Mum grew up with horses, and they remained a passion all her life. Indeed, in the months before she went into the nursing home, she used to leave on the table a copy of Desmond Morris's book, Horse Watching, and would thumb her way through the illustrations, although she could no longer read the text. In fact, although she rarely had the opportunity to mount one after she left home at the age of 22, she nevertheless took her last ride in Mexico, at the age of 83.

Photo from a family friend, marked "From Walter to Uncle Tom".

     In the early days, at one point, she estimated they had 60 horses in the stable yard, mostly draught horses - essential precursors to tractors and trucks. As the above photo illustrates, a double team with six to eight horses in each might be required to move the harvest. Here's another example. (I told you the photographs of those days were not particularly good.)

     Apart from the plough and the harvest, human beings required transport. At any one time there would be only one "sulky horse" for the adults, and one for taking the children to school. In addition, there was the quota of riding horses.
     In the midst of this equine family stood a rather colourful  character named Major, a draught horse gelding with an interesting passion. He just loved foals. If a mare had a foal in a neighbouring paddock, he would find his way in to be with it. Later on, he wanted to go into the crops. Fences were no obstacle, since barbed wire was present only on the external fences. The internal ones he simply climbed over. To cramp his style, they put side-lines on him: chains running between the front and back legs on either side. Even then, he would often work his way through the wire. Eventually, Mum thinks, he died of old age.
     As a general rule, they kept mares and geldings. During the war, when Charlie had a place of his own, he would keep stallions, and Mum attempted to ride one, but found it too spirited, and intent on returning home, so she jumped off. It must have been something of a let-down, because walking was not something a human being would sink to except in unusual circumstances. To cover any distance, you first went out and caught a horse - even, as Mum humorously used to add, if it meant walking farther than than if you had elected to use shank's pony in the first place. Some horses got ridden all the time because they were easy to catch, for not every horse was co-operative. Some would hurry out of the way when they saw someone approach carrying a bridle.  Once Uncle Alf once went to school with an otherwise quiet horse which just happened to have the bad habit of biting people. He came home with his arms all chewed up.Others tried a more subtle approach; they would attempt to puff themselves up in order to make it difficult to attach the saddle girths - that's on the rare occasion anyone used a saddle.
     Grandpa had a serious objection to children using saddles. When they fell off, they might get dragged along the ground at speed with a foot caught in the stirrup. And fall they would. According to his maxim, you had to fall off 300 times before you properly knew how to ride. ("How many time is that, Daddy?" asked little Lil after one tumble. "It's not far off 300," he reassured her.) What about a helmet? I hear you ask. Forgetaboutit! Never heard of such a thing in those days! Have a look at this photo. That's Mum on the horse at right, with her aunt on the other. Does either of them look like she is wearing a helmet?

Left to right: Olga, Hilda, Marion McGovern, Alf Dennis, and Margaret

     So how, you might ask, did they mount the horse without a stirrup? Well, when the child was very small, a parent or older sibling would set him/her on a post and bring the horse over. As they grew older, they became very adept at placing a foot on the animal's knee- which is the middle joint of the front leg - grasping the mane, and heaving themselves up. And, of course, the Dennis kids, like modern children racing their bicycles downhill, believed that a horse shouldn't be ridden unless it was ridden fast. They envied their neighbours, the Macks, for they had beautiful whips made from river saplings. The Dennises were never allowed to hit a horse. Considering some of the other things they did, perhaps this was just as well.
    Riding was a skill acquired only slightly later than that of walking. As you are aware, very few of us can remember events earlier than our third birthday and, if we are honest, we would admit that we have only fragmentary memories of the period prior to starting school, which is the first big change in our lives. Thus, Mum had no recollection of learning to ride. It was something she had always done. She did remember simply sliding off the McQueeny's pony, which was slightly taller than a Shetland pony: about 10 hands, or 40 inches [101 cm] at the shoulder.
      But she did remember training the younger children in horsemanship. Charlie, ten years her junior, was a case in point. "I couldn't get out of taking that confounded kid," she moaned. She would pick him up and place him in front of her, on the horse's withers, and expect him to hold on with his legs (and presumably, cling to the mane with his hands). After a short while, he was expected to ride behind her and hang on tight. However, this was not necessary comfortable for a small child. "You get very hurt on the back of a horse, bareback, going like mad", to quote my mother. He would complain she was going too fast. "Listen," was her unkind reply, "if you come with me, you'll ride at my pace." Besides, by the age of three (three!) a child should be riding alone, and she told him so. But Charlie definitely did not like the idea. He attached himself to Halley, who was only six years older, even then he was told, "If you come with me, you'll go at my pace."
      But don't worry, Uncle Charlie; all is forgiven. When heading south for a family reunion on her 90th birthday, Mum referred to him as "my favourite brother".
     As I have said on more than one occasion, the fact that all nine children survived to adulthood had nothing to do with ingrained caution. Mum remembers an occasion when a horse, while harnessed to a sulky, decided to run off for some reason, and the small child seated on the horse's back was thrown to the ground. He or she was only two or three years old. Another time, when my mother was 10 or 11 years old, her brother, Halley, four younger, had the misfortune to have the school horse tread on his bare foot. Their own mother being absent in Wagga, Mum took him inside and bathed his swollen foot with hot water (which, under current first aid theory is the opposite of what should have been done.) "We were lucky draught horses didn't put their foot on us," said Mum, "because we did the most dreadful things."
     "Like what?" I asked.
     "Walking behind draught horses in the stable. It's a stupid thing to do! But we were young. We could have been kicked or smashed to pieces." (When we visited the homestead as boys, we were firmly instructed by our mother never to walk behind a horse, unless we wanted to be kicked. And, not being experienced enough to be blasé about the beasts, we did what we were told. Well, most of the time.)
     But if you think that was reckless behaviour, try this for size. Despite being seven years her junior, Lil was possibly Mum's favourite sister because she had the same adventurous spirit. She could get her to do anything. So, when Lil was about five or six years old, Mum thought it would be a great idea to teach Lil to swim. Now, during the whole of her 97 years, Mum herself never learned to swim, but that was no reason why her little sister shouldn't learn. They had been told that, if ever they were forced to cross a flooded river, they should dismount and hold onto the horse's tail. She therefore took Lil along to the deep end of the dam, where they weren't supposed to go, and brother Halley, two years older than Lil, came along as unofficial observer.
     I wish there was some way to depict Mum's tone of voice as she related the adventure. She rode into the middle of the dam, then instructed Lil to dismount and grab hold of the horse's tail, which she obediently proceeded to do. Unfortunately, Mum had taken the wrong pony. If it had been her own regular mount, it probably would have gone through, but this one floundered. She tipped sideways, and her tail, which should have streamed out behind her as she swam, simply went down with Lil's weight. Now she was under water, and mixed up with the pony's hindquarters and flailing legs, while Mum was struggling to maintain her bareback balance on the sidewards leaning horse. In her desperation, she called out to Halley. He at least knew how to dog paddle, and managed to bring his little sister safely to shore. "If Halley hadn't been there," said Mum, "I don't know what would have happened." Probably she and the horse would have got out, but Lil would have been kicked, trodden on, and drowned.
     "I'm surprised you kids didn't get killed," I said.
     "I don't know," she replied. "I really and truly don't know."
   
     As you read in a previous chapter, the long ride to school could be boring to the average active child. Mum was at home when the following event occurred. She thinks it was when she was recovering from pneumonia during her first year. If so, it raises some questions of chronology, for she had already stated that they did not acquire a sulky until two years later, when Aunt Olga went to school. However, we must not assume perfect recollection after a lapse of eight decades. Perhaps before that time, they occasionally used the parents' sulky. Or perhaps they didn't have a "sulky horse" of their own.
     At any rate, she was at home, while her two older brothers, Jack and Alf were using a half-draught horse burrowed from their next door neighbour, Mr Hughes. On the way home, they played a familiar game: driving back and forth in front of the Clothier children's horse. But this time, the sulky shaft broke, and pierced the hindquarters of Hughes' mare- almost up to her "udder". Jack Clothier, who was a much older boy, came to their assistance and stuck a handkerchief into the wound to staunch the bleeding. He must have come home with them. The result was that the boys had to ride the pony the next day. And, of course, the embarrassing thing was that it wasn't their horse. Grandpa had to go over and confess his offspring's misdeeds to Mr Hughes. To make matters worse, he still needed to borrow the horse the following day to use with the orchard sprayer. Oh well, I suppose Mr Hughes had children of his own. If not, he had been a boy himself once.
     How did the younger children fare? Well, Aunt Hilda distinctly remembers the episode of the race with the Bertrams. She remembers the names of four of them: Eric, Nancy, Tom, and Lil; perhaps there were more. Living about three miles [5 km] down the road from the Dennises, their paths crossed on the return route from school, and apparently the horse drawing the two oldest girls was incredibly slow. On the Dennis side, the three youngest, Charlie, Doug, and Hilda had a sulky to themselves. Boys being what they are, they started to make fun of the slowness of the rival horse. "Why, we can run faster than him ourselves!" they skited. And, leaving their little sister holding the reins, they dismounted and set about proving their point.
     The Bertram girls were humiliated. Unfortunately for them, there was not much revenge they could wreak on Charlie and Doug, so they decided to take it out on poor Hilda. At the time, Malebo school held 26 pupils, of which I suppose half were girls. The Bertram girls persuaded their female schoolmates to cold shoulder Hilda the next morning. No-one would talk to her - except the two oldest girls, who considered themselves above such pettiness. (On second thoughts, Aunt Hilda thinks they may have been the Mullins girls.)
     Aunt Hilda also narrated the occasion when Doug, having opened a gate, somehow fell under the sulky's wheels as it moved forwards. His sister remembers that bump as the vehicle drove over his back. However, he eventually lived to celebrate his 90th birthday, so it didn't do him too much harm. Once a draught horse mare died giving birth to twins, and Aunt Olga hand reared the two foals, feeding them cow's milk.

     No doubt you have watched lots of movies about the days before the motor car. It probably never registers with you that the streets appear unnaturally clean. Well, here is something the movie makers seldom emphasize. No-one has ever learnt how to toilet train a horse. In the days when the horse was king, His Majesty's residue tended to be scattered at irregular intervals over the public thoroughfares, to the delight of the nation's flies and the dismay of fastidious male pedestrians and women with long, trailing skirts. In zones of heavy traffic, this odoriferous residue was liable to be accumulate so abundantly that some people earned a precarious living from tips by wielding a broom for the benefit of street-crossers, or even carrying ladies across in their strong hands. I say nothing about the morning after the ball, when all the horses and carriages of the gentry had departed from the elegant dance hall.
     Well, one day Mum had been left in charge of the sulky in Wagga Wagga. I suppose her mother or father had business in the town and she had accompanied them. In any case, the sulky in which she was waiting was parked on some sort of hill or rise. Also, the camber of the street was such that it sloped slightly downwards from the side on which she was parked. Now, at last, the horse was at rest, and it decided that this would be an ideal time to empty its bladder. Now a horse, particularly one which draws a sulky, is a big animal, and its bladder is correspondingly copious. To her horror, and acute embarrassment, my mother watched as a broad yellow stream flowed across the street, reached the gutter on the opposite side, and continue its course down the hill. And there she sat, praying that her parent(s) would soon return, or else the ground would open up and hide her.
     That might have been the most embarrassing event, but it was not the only one. Once, when she was in her early to mid-teens, she rode down to collect the mail. Now, at that time, her own mother had ordered a set of wheels for one of the younger children's trolley, and there, address to "A. A. Dennis" was an "enormous parcel", as big as a chaff bag. Hello, thought Mum, this must be the wheels, even though it was addressed to her father rather than her mother. It was not heavy and, somehow, she managed to get it up, despite the fact that she had no stirrup to assist her, and placed it right across the mare's withers before setting off for home "bareback, hell for leather" (naturally!). And, as she explained, "it isn't easy to get a horse to canter when you have an enormous bag of feathers on her." Because that's what it turned out to be. They had been ordered by her Uncle Arnold of Coolamon, but because he bore the same initial as her father, it had gone to the wrong address.
     Another time, again at the age of fourteen or fifteen, she rode out to take lunch to her father and brothers working in a paddock perhaps a mile and a half [2½ km] away, and she was rewarded by being handed an "enormous box" two or three feet across, containing surplus crockery (presumably of the metal variety). Getting it up on the horse's withers would not have been as awkward as the bag of feathers; she could have simply remained on the mount and allowed the menfolk to lift it up. Between them and the homestead stood two gates, and it is an invariable rule in the country that you leave a gate as you found it: open if it were already open, closed if it were closed. The first gate she opened and reclosed without dismounting; no problem. The real trouble was that the best of horses is a skittish animal. In this case, it touched a bit of wire, and reacted. She reared up in fright, and the reins broke as Mum tumbled backwards. She fell onto a rotten pine pole, which shattered on impact, leaving a plethora of splinters in her left buttock. Meanwhile, the horse had bolted, but fortunately, gate number 2 barred its way. Mum felt absolutely humiliated. There was the possibility that the neighbour she could see on the roadside a long way off may have witnessed the accident. The last thing she wanted was for him to wonder why she wasn't riding, so she recaptured the horse and remounted, box and all.
     Her mother's assistance was required to remove the splinters from her derrière, and she was unable to sleep that night. Don't expect sympathy in a big family. Her brothers thought it was a great joke.
   
     Mum estimates she was about ten, eleven, or twelve when the following tragedy occurred, because Jack was at school and four or five of the children were involved. Judging from their birthdates, I deduce that the culprits were Jack, Alf, Margaret, and Olga. Their neighbours, the Macks (the daughter of whom was to later become my godmother) had put in a new well about four miles [6½ km] away, so they decided to investigate. (It must have been pretty darn boring down at the farm if that was their idea of excitement.) "We had no right looking at the Macks' well," she said. Just the same, they got out the sulky and harnessed up Darkie, the slow old horse which used to take them to school. The two boys got out to look at the well, so the girls did likewise - and they secured the horse by tying the reins to the spokes of the sulky wheel. "No-one's supposed to tie a horse's reins to the spokes."
     What do you expect? "Poor old Darkie" went to get a bit of grass, and the wheel pulled him back. He fell over and broke the shaft. Disaster! Somehow or other the boys fixed it up with a paling or something. Now the childhood code of omertà came into effect. The boys swore the girls to secrecy. They merely told their father than Darkie had fallen over.
     "Dad took him down that night and shot him - he and Larry O'Shannessy. Shot the poor old thing. Because he would not have a stumbling horse. Too dangerous for kids. No, we never told Dad [the truth] because the boys said we mustn't tell. We never thought to tell. Don't trust kids!"
     I've always felt terribly sad every time I heard that story. Mum couldn't say how many horses they went through. "We just wore them out." Their father came from a large family himself. He "couldn't give his own good horses. He didn't trust kids. He knew they'd fight. He knew they's run it into the gutter. But he didn't think they'd do what they weren't supposed to do."
     Finally, there was the sad story of Charlie, a great big horse owned by the Richards. The eldest child, Dora was not so bad, but the Richards boys were pigs, in my mother's assessment. In the winter time, for example, when it was wet, and Charlie was tied up in the school paddock, they would shake the pine tree to make the drops fall on poor Charlie. Also, they gave reckless driving a whole new meaning. The youngest boy, aged perhaps about seven, was so scared of their antics that he would never ride in the sulky with them. Instead, he used to stand on the spring at the back, holding on to the seat, so that he could easily be thrown off in case of an accident. This behaviour was a great source of merriment to the Dennises, but it turned out to be a sensible precaution after all.
     Outside the school gate lay a gutter, which the Dennis children were supposed to go around, and usually they did so. Not so the Richards boys. Gutters were for driving through, and sticks were for poking the rear end of the hapless Charlie to make him go fast. This time, the two peccadilloes combined to produce a disaster. They crashed through the gutter at speed, and something happened. Perhaps they overturned, and probably the shaft broke. The traces broke, and Charlie tore across the road, and ripped a hole in the fence on the other side.
     Out stormed the teacher in a rage, and instructed the laughing Dennis kids to return home via the Richards' homestead and inform the father of what had happened, and that he, the teacher, would be bringing his offspring home. When the Dennises arrived, there was Charlie, "a rangy white horse" with half his harness still dangling from him. "Well, next day, poor old Charlie was shot. Well, it wasn't his fault. Wretched kids! You can't have a bolting horse. He didn't bolt. They made him. Kids are terrible!"
     Next day, the Richards kids had to walk to school. That'd teach them! Some time later, my grandfather purchased their property, so that was that.

     Now, one final revelation. "You can't make money owning a race horse" is a popular adage; the cost of maintenance, training, and so forth will dwarf any winning you may gain. However, when I made the comment to a taxi driver who owned a few, he replied that it was true only of thoroughbreds. Trotting horses, as he knew from experience, can make a profit. As long as Mum could remember, her father always had trotting horses. You may remember from the second chapter how he was regularly advertising a stud trotting horse at Currawarna. His older sister Martha Dennis was also well known in harness racing circles. In Mum's time her father used to stable them in Wagga Wagga, and when they ceased to win races, they would be brought home to use for riding. During the Second World War, he graduated to race horses ie thoroughbreds. This bring me to the last anecdote, told by Uncle Alf, the second son.
    A woman said to him: "When a man gets middle aged and prosperous, he does one of three things: gets himself a mistress, falls in love with his wife again, or buys a race horse. My father fell in love with his wife again."
     "And mine," said Alf, "bought a race horse."

Read more about animals in the next chapter, or go back to the index.

Possums, Pets, and Poddy Lambs

     This is a photo of my mother, aged about 14, feeding the poddy lambs, accompanied by her sister, Lil and (probably) baby brother, Doug.
     A poddy lamb is one rejected by its mother. In a flock of one or two thousand, there might be four, five, or six such virtual orphans at any one time. One year, there were a whole two dozen requiring bottled cow's milk. Lambs, of course, like humans and koalas, all have different faces and sizes, but folks unfamiliar with them labour under the illusion that they all look the same. Once Mum had to go to town, leaving her mother to handle the lambs. Chaos! Confusion! All those lambs jostling for the teat; they wouldn't stand in line! How do you tell them apart? She strongly suspected some of them got in for a second helping.
     As you can see, the photo is of typical quality for those old, unprofessional, point-and-shoot type cameras, and I have made no attempt to straighten it. In case you are wondering about the contraction in the background, it is a Furphy water cart. Their original function was to carry water to livestock, but they provided an invaluable service to the human livestock of the First World War, where they also became a venue for gossip and rumour allegedly provided by the office water cooler today. However, considering that military plans usually issued from much higher up, and were supposed to be secret, the reliability of such rumours tended to be low - hence the term, "furphy" for questionable or unreliable unofficial information.

Possums

     Once, when she was about the same age as per the above photo, one of the hired hands brought home a little ringtail possum. Having been adopted by the family, the little mite used to sleep in one of the large water bags which used to hang from the top of the verandah, as described in a later chapter. It also used to scurry upside down along the telephone line to one of the trees, where it found a mate, because it then returned to the house and produced a baby. The possum family was never really friendly to their hosts, but they found a home behind the chimney, and used to make shocking noises when they were up and about (which, if I know anything about possums, would have been during the human family's bedtime.) The youngster eventually went over to the shed. Possums, you understand, are territorial, and a grown-up offspring isn't allowed to stay with its mother forever.
     Years later, after Mum had left home, another possum was acquired by either Charlie or Doug, the two youngest sons. Perhaps it arrived at a younger age, but this one was friendly. It would snuggle in the boy's arms, and sit on his head with its prehensile tail curled around his face or neck. It used to empty its bladder in that posture also, a habit which was considered less endearing. Whereas, the earlier pet would scurry along the telephone wires, this one would climb over the tops of the wall paintings. It would also share Grandma's bed, though I am unaware of Grandpa's opinion on the matter. However, one day, when she was in bed, and pet possum was perched on top of the wardrobe, in walked grandson Rex, Halley's son. According to Mum, the possum was jealous, but I suspect something equally basic: territoriality. Here was a stranger, violating its domain! That possum flew down off the wardrobe and assailed poor Rex, who was reduced to hiding under the bedclothes for protection.
     They eventually gave it away, and it died of heat stroke under the laundry during the 1939 bushfire.

Dogs

     Would you believe that, in those days, you never called a female dog a "bitch"? It was a disreputable term. The proper word was "slut"! I learnt that when Mum casually threw the word into the conversation, but it can also be found in Henry Lawson's short story, "That There Dog of Mine".
     Dogs were not pets on the Wagga farm; they were workers, mostly kelpies. Normally two or three at any one time, they were kept chained up outside and not allowed into the house. The children were not supposed to handle or play with the puppies, or they would not grow up to be effective sheep dogs. But Grandma did, just the same.
     Nevertheless, Grandpa loved dogs, and they reciprocated. Indeed, at one time Doug acquired a dog, but the wretched canine transferred its affections to his father. One slut - I think her name was Coffee - absolutely doted on Grandpa. She would come into town in the sulky with him, and he would leave her there while he dined at the hotel. But it was a futile exercise; she used to sneak into the dining room and curl up under his table. (This was before health regulations became too strict.)

Cats

     My mother didn't tell me anything about cats. However, according to my Aunt Hilda, her sister, Olga always kept cats. I suppose she was a young adult at the date of this anecdote, because she was 14 years older than Hilda, who was a little girl at the time. In any case, one evening this cat was making a noise in the tree in front of the house, so her father decided to shoot it. He always was a lousy shot, and in this case he merely blasted off its lower jaw. Olga, needless to say, was outraged, and insisted he go out and finish the job properly.

Magpies

     The Dennis children also discovered that if they acquired a magpie while still young and brought it up, it would remain a pet. One would have thought this a rather risky undertaking, considering the parent magpies' propensity for dive-bombing potential predators, and I am sorry I never asked Mum about it. In any case, the usual place to find them was the lucerne tree. (Lucerne tree? What the heck is a lucerne tree? I thought lucerne was a ground crop. It is. The other name is alfalfa. However, there does exist a distantly related tree, native to the Canary Isles, which can likewise be used as a livestock forage crop. You hardly ever see them up here in Queensland, but entire hedges of them can be found in New South Wales, and especially in Western Australia.)
     Now, I don't know how many such magpies had been tamed, but one of them was certainly acquired about 1922, when Mum was aged 13. You'll remember from an earlier chapter that, at the time, she was required to take her three-year-old brother, Charlie everywhere with her on the horse. Well, it is likely that the little boy had teased the bird, because it took a virulent dislike to him. Whenever it saw the two of them riding past, it would swoop down from the lucerne tree or shed where it was perched, and peck poor Charlie hard on the head. That same bird had also been taught to speak; it would say, "Charlie's a bad boy!"

Snakes

     Although they don't actually fit the title of this chapter, we might use this space to mention snakes. Once, while in her early teens - it must have been spring, and haymaking time - Mum was sent out to deliver lunch to her father in the paddock. On this occasion, she took the exceptional step of walking; probably she hadn't been able to catch a horse. Much to her alarm, she almost walked on a snake, and a bit farther on, another one slid down a hole.
     But the real adventure happened to Jack, the oldest brother, when he was in his late teens or early twenties. Now, as a zoology graduate, I would like to make two points about Australian snakes. The first is that the most common ones are some of the most venomous in the world. The second is that, despite everything, they are generally docile. They'll leave you alone if you leave them alone. Most Australians, and in particular, most rural Australians, are aware of the former, but not the latter. They think that the only good snake is a dead snake.
     So, when Uncle Jack came across a snake while working alone away from the house, he picked up a stick and tried to kill it. The snake, provoked into self-defence, turned and sunk its fangs into his leg, below the knee. Suddenly, Jack saw the Grim Reaper advancing, dark scythe in hand, and his mind raced through all the procedures he had been taught for treating snake bite. In those days, there was little, if any, antivenene and, in any case, he was a long way from any medical facilities. Standard first aid for snake bite was much more brutal than today, and it continued right up to the 1960s, when I was a boy. First, you had to place a tourniquet very tight around the upper part of the limb, tight enough to prevent circulation of the deep arterial blood which would be carrying the venom to the rest of the body. Then you were supposed to make a deep (up to one centimetre) x-shaped incision at the site of the bite, and suck the blood and venom out. Of course, if you had a cut or sore in your mouth, the venom would enter by that route as well.
     Now, the hay bales were bound with extremely strong binding twine - about which more in the next chapter. He managed to get hold of one of these bands and tied it really tight around his thigh. Now, how to cut the wound? "Be prepared!" the Scouts say, and this is one reason why you should always carry a knife with you, especially on a farm. But he had no knife. Bright idea! He took out his tin of Capstan tobacco, and somehow ripped the lid to obtain a sharp edge, if not exactly a very stiff one, and was able to slice into the wound. Unfortunately, not being a contortionist, he could find no way to suck out the blood. This should preferably be done by a companion. Instead, he pressed out as much blood as possible.
     At this point, another problem arose. He was seated, and he couldn't get up, for he was suffering from so much emotional shock. But eventually he managed to get to his feet, only to find that his thigh was so swollen, he was unable to remove the ligature. (These days, a tourniquet is not recommended, because it may result in tissue death. Instead, you are advised to wrap a tight bandage around the effective limb - not that that would have been possible in his circumstances.) With great difficulty, he limped the mile or so back to the house, where a family member cut off the tourniquet.
     All that happened in the afternoon. Would you believe! By evening he was well enough to go courting.

Now go forward to see how the farm was run,
or back to return to the index.

How the Farm Was Run

     How was an effective wheat farm managed in the 1920s and '30s?

     Well, for a start, being such a long way from town meant that country people developed a philosophy of economy which, I presume, still exists: never throw out the last scrap of any item, such as yarn, until a replacement has been acquired. You never know when you will have to "make do". And in this respect, we should mention two omnibus items in particular. One you have already encountered with Uncle Jack's adventure with the snake: binding twine. It was not wire, but very stiff, very strong twine, whose primary purpose was to be fed into a machine, which in turn wrapped it tightly around a bale of hay. But they used it for every other function requiring binding. The second was the four gallon [9 litres] tins of kerosene. Once they had served their purpose, they would have their tops cut off, and a handle inserted, so that they could be used as buckets. As every schoolboy used to know, a gallon weighs ten pounds [4.54 kg], so a bucket of that size would be weighty, to say the least. With the specific gravity of kerosene being approximately 0.82, compared to 1.0 for water, a full tin of kerosene would top the scales at 33 lb or nearly 15 kg, not counting the weight of the container.

     Let's start with the homestead, and work outwards. I've already mentioned the water bag hung on the verandah as a source of cool drinking water, and will go into more detail about it in the next chapter. I've also mentioned that kerosense-driven refrigerator available by the time I visited the farm. But once upon a time, domestic refrigeration was beyond the dreams of mortals. In the city, commercial refrigeration was available to produce large blocks of ice. Thus began the process whereby the "ice man" would do the rounds of the urban householders. There exists a black-and-white silent movie of an ice man bearing a large block of ice up a steep hill, only to lose it by melting before it reached the customer. The ice would be lodged in an upper compartment of the ice chest. The cold air produced as it melted, being heavier than warmer air, would sink to the lower compartment when the meat, milk, and butter was stored, while the warmer air rose to assist the melting. Hopefully, there was still some coolness left by the time the ice man returned the following day. I don't know what happened on Sundays. But I do vaguely remember something like that when I was very little, for I was born in 1949, and I gather that domestic refrigerators were introduced to Brisbane in 1954.
     But the ice man never made his rounds in the country. The farmers had to make do with a "Coolgardie safe". Basically, it was a container open at the side, over which was hung a strip of hessian, then a strip of saddle cloth hung over that. Water was kept on top, and allowed to run over and soak the cloth. It only remained to set up the safe in a place subject to the wind - the verandah was one such spot -and hopefully, the wind would cool the water-soaked cloth, and lower the temperature of the contents. It could not have been terribly efficient. My grandmother's sister, Ada had a very big safe - about three or four feet wide. And it was a sore point with Mum that, after she left home, her copies of the National Geographic were stored in the "meat house", and rendered unreadable due to water damage.
     Obviously, such a convenience would be useless for large quantities of meat. When a sheep was slaughtered, my grandmother would cut it up, salt it, and hang it up from a tree enclosed in a sugar bag. My own mother never learned how to do it, and claimed her father used too much salt. Sausages? Forget about it! They could only be obtained in town, in winter. When people went to Sydney, they ate fish and sausages.
     Farmers, of course, have to be more or less self-sufficient in vegetables. The garden next to the house was the wife's responsibility. When my mother was about thirteen or fourteen ie approximately 1924-5, her father managed to get well water piped in to both the garden and the lawn. How they were watered before that I cannot say. It must have been an onerous task.

Wheat
     Now let's move to the major cash crop: wheat. As I mentioned once before, when Grandpa started up the farm, he was so poor he had to broadcast the seed wheat by hand. By the time Mum was a girl, however, a combine drill was used. Fertiliser went into one box, and wheat seed into another, and as the plough advanced, both wheat and fertiliser went down the drill into the furrow. Initially, it was all drawn by a team of about eight horses, but Grandpa was one of the first to invest in a tractor - sometime in the first part of the 1920s. Needless to say, ploughing by tractor is different to ploughing by horse, and certain adjustments were required. Also, there were times and places where a tractor was not practical. He did, for example, use horses all throughout World War II.
     Originally, harvesting was performed by a Sunshine Harvester, drawn by a team of horses (naturally!). Later, when Mum was at school, her father acquired a header. There was great excitement when they discovered it possessed a false comb, which raised the ears of wheat to the heads for cropping. Eventually, he had two headers going. Christmas was the deadline; good farmers managed to complete the harvest by then - usually long before then. They would commence in November.
     So, how much did a harvest amount to? It depended on the year. Six, seven, or eight bags of wheat per acre would have been considered normal. Ten was excellent. Once Grandpa won a prize for the best crop in the district. But farming is a precarious lifestyle. I have already mentioned Grandpa's adage that, provided you get three good years when starting up, you should be able to manage. In 1914 there was a very bad drought. Only one wagon load of wheat was produced.
    As an aside, I should mention how her older brother, Alf served as a soldier in North Africa, and when the city slickers (who were also affected by the heavy boots they were forced to wear) complained about the terrible heat during the day, and the cold at night, Alf told them it was no worse than Wagga.. "No wind blows in the Riverina at harvest time," explained Mum. "It's just plain hot." But one year it did blow. Mum remembers her father swearing as he gazed over his crop, watching the grain fall off in the wind. A lot of it was of no use except for hay.
     Another year, in the late 1920s, the rain set in at harvest time. That was not supposed to happen. The wheat just fell down, and couldn't be harvested. There were always bags of wheat in the paddocks, but they had to set them on stumps because, laid on the ground, they would rot. Naturally, too, since so much of the grain had not be collected, it sprouted and went to seed. Some farmers managed to bring in a second crop of sorts, but Grandpa decided it just wasn't worth while. Mum suspects he put in sheep instead.
     Nevertheless, over a period of time, my grandfather managed to buy out other properties, bringing his total up to 1,000 acres. About 1919, he paid cash for the adjacent property, which had been allowed to go to weed. To be precise, it was covered with mustard, about two feet high. Grandpa's solution was to buy 500 wethers, and set them onto the mustard, thereby clearing the property for wheat, while providing a saleable source of mutton and wool. Whether the diet affected their taste is something I failed to discover, but the property eventually devolved to the eldest son, Jack.
     Not all the land was suitable for wheat. Slopes not accessible to the plough and the header were good enough for lucerne, which ended up as livestock fodder. Both wheat and lucerne would be bundled up and stacked in a shed. However, people handling chaff ran the danger of catching ringworm. Those were the days before all the beautiful modern fungicides were produced. The only treatment available was the purple-staining Condy's crystals, or potassium permangenate.

Livestock
     By the time I was a boy wheat farming had been discontinued, but no farmer ever really retires. When everything else was gone, there were always a few sheep left over. In its heyday ie when Mum was a child, the farm always kept 1,000 sheep, and at one point, they went up to 2,000. When Grandpa was shearing away from the house, sometimes his children would visit him on the way back from school, and he's tell them to kick their shoes in the fleece. That way, they wouldn't need to polish them the next day.
      I've already described the poddy lambs, and the dogs which were kept to herd the sheep. As a fallback source of income, sheep also had their advantages. Getting rid of mustard is something which springs to mind. When skeleton weed threatened to destroy the crop, and some farmers went broke, Grandpa moved from adult sheep to fat lambs, and set them into the newly planted fields. The noxious plant only had time to break the surface, when it would be chewed down to the root by the energetic lambs, who would come back with their noses covered with dirt and the weed's sticky resin.
     Everyone had at least a few pigs.
     As you can imagine, there would always be paddocks given over to grass or some livestock fodder. Apart from anything else, you can't grow the same crop on the same ground year in and year out and expect the yield to continue. The land needs to lie fallow every now and then. Besides, horses at least were indispensable, and they live on more than fresh air. Grandpa purchased a place down near the river initially to rest his horses there, and afterwards decided it would also be useful for "store" cattle ie cattle in poor condition, and sometimes wild, which required fattening up before sale. He was an excellent farmer, who was constantly on the watch for opportunities and changes in the market.

Charlie, aged 17, driving cattle to the river property.

     Another of Grandpa's adages was that anyone could be a cow cocky, who was the Australian version of a peasant. Even dairy farmers seldom ran more than about forty cows. He himself always had a few milk cows, and during the Depression he sought out a friend, and they each took a half share in a dairy. His daughters, Olga and Lil were conscripted into helping him with the milking. Initially, they were allowed to kept the proceeds, but soon the farm expenses became too demanding, and he was forced to commandeer the money for consolidated revenue. In any case, once out of the cow, the milk went into a separator. I remember this as a boy. You pour the milk into the top of the machine, turn the handle, and eventually cream issues from one outlet, and skim milk from another. While the skim milk went to the livestock, the cream went into a large can, to be collected by the butter factory in Wagga Wagga. For the Dennises, the collection depot was four miles away at the corner of the farm owned by the Macks, whose daughter, Aileen eventually became my godmother. The collector must have been quick about his business if the cream didn't spoil, because the summers can be really hot, and refrigeration on the farms was non-existent. My Aunt Hilda, the youngest, and last survivor of the family, vividly remembers the delight of having the cans coming back containing butter, and a large block of ice, which they used to break up and serve with their tea.

Water Supply
      I've already mentioned the dams and the windmills. Strictly speaking, although everybody in Australia and the U.S. uses the term, "windmill", they are, in fact, wind pumps, and that is what they are called in South Africa. It is just that, once they were invented in the U.S., people naturally adopted the name current in Europe, where similar machines function to grind grain. In any case, they used the force of the wind to pump up water from a depth of 150 feet, whence it was pumped into a big corrugated iron tank, and thence into a trough for the use by the horses and other stock. Of course, the children often had to take their horses down to the trough, and they considered it great fun to drink next to the horse. Unfortunately, their father acted the spoilsport, and pointed out that the trough also served as a swimming pool for their dog, Toby, and it would be best if they didn't use it. As for the sheep, they drank at a dam in another paddock, or else they were driven to the well.

Pests
     What would a farm be like if it didn't have weeds competing for space with the crop, or animals competing for grass with the stock, or eating the crop before it was harvested, or simply getting in the way? In the last group one would include Bathurst burr, whose propagation system involved getting caught up in the sheep's wool.
     Skeleton weed has already been mentioned.  Patterson's curse, which fills the paddocks with that beautiful purple colour, is a noxious weed. If a farmer was stupid enough to allow it to remain on his grounds, an inspector from the Department of Agriculture would come down on him. Interestingly, when I was a boy, and the farm was no longer active, the paddocks were full of dry, dead thistles, but these were not noxious weeds. The ones they had to worry about in the old days were star thistles, which tended to arrive with the floods to re-infect cleared land.
     Then there were the insects. You can lose an awful lot of the crop if grasshoppers get into the green wheat. My grandfather would watch a plague of them climbing up the stems, chewing at the greenery, and he knew he'd have to get the harvest in quickly, or else the nibbling varmints would cause the heads of the wheat to fall off, and be lost.
     The first recorded mouse plague in Australia was in 1903, and the farm in the Riverina used to be hit every four or five years, often in winter. This may be have something to do with the fact that, in that part of the world, it is the wet season, although mice typically breed from October to April. I was undergoing my zoology training in the 1970s, about the time scientists really got involved in mouse plague research. It turns out the precipitating causes are complex, and vary with the district, but involve such things as the type of soil - whether it provides cracks for their nests - rainfall, and farming practices.
     Be that as it may, when a plague struck, they would swarm everywhere, and eat anything - even wallpaper. My mother remembers one of her relatives - I think it was her Aunt Ada - had them make nests in her kapok mattress. But even during non-plague years, my grandfather would place the bags of flour on the kitchen table prior to retiring, in order to keep it away from the mice.
     During a plaque, they used to pour some golden syrup into an empty four gallon kerosene tin, and lean a board against the rim. The idea was that a mouse would run up the board, sniffing out the golden syrup, fall in, and come to a sticky end. Another solution would be to take one of the casks which, under normal circumstances, would be used to store pork once a pig had been killed and salted. Such casks could be obtained from a brewery, or even be made to order. But during mouse plagues, they would dump some seed wheat inside as bait, and add copper sulphate as poison. In any case, it would be like trimming the edge of the jungle.
     Rabbits! Not only would they eat your grass, but their breeding propensity made your property a threat to your neighbours'. You would be fined if you didn't eliminate any rabbits on your property. And it was a never-ending battle. You would clean up the area near the river, only to have a pregnant female float down on the next flood and re-infect the site. (Just like the star thistles!) Those were the days before myxomatosis and the calicivirus, so you were left to do it the hard way. First, you had to seal off all the entrances of a warren but one, then stuff a hessian bag soaked in "carbon" into the one remaining hole, and set it alight - a sort of gas warfare against rabbits.
     Once he employed young Halley and one of the local boys to spend a whole week down by the river smoking out rabbits. For the duration, they lived in a shed, which Mum remembers as being lined with newspaper, for "those were the days of the Old Bark Hut".

And now, go forward to the next, and second last chapter, or back to the index.

"Country Girls Don't Work."

     My mother was, if anything, a workaholic, but there were two aspects of her life on the Riverina on which she was adamant. The first was that country girls don't work. They had "a lovely time doing nothing." The second was that her family was unusual in that they valued daughters just as much as sons.
     Perhaps this was because her parents had two sons, Jack and Alf before they had her, and whatever might have been the principle applied to daughters working, it didn't apply to sons. Jack and Alf had no chance to attend the school break-ups; they were always pulled out of class early to assist with the harvest, which took place in November, and had to be finished by Christmas. To them fell the task of rolling, which meant hitching a team of three or four horses to a "roller", a spiked cylinder attached to a driver's seat, and rolling it over the field to break up the clods following the harvest.
      Now, it obviously takes a bit of skill and concentration to do this properly, but it didn't strike me as particularly heavy work, so I asked why the girls couldn't do it. Her reply spoke a lot for the social conventions of the time, because the question took her off guard, and left her momentarily lost for an explanation. Well, you had to sit and drive the horses. So? It wasn't women's work. It was men's work! But why? Was it too heavy for girls to do? Finally, she stated: "Dad considered if a man got his wife or daughters to work, there was something wrong with him. He couldn't provide." The girls, however, did go and remove the collars off the horses and stack them, so you can't say they didn't do their bit.
     The boys would also be set to cutting the chaff. As mentioned before, Alf used to board in Wagga Wagga while he attended high school. At the end of term he would come home on the wagon which carried the first load of wheat. He would be granted one day's grace to rest - that was considered a great concession - and then be set to sewing bags with the men, but without their wages. These days grain is stored in bulk in silos, but in the olden days it was bagged. Indeed, at school we used to be taught: 60 pounds to a bushel of wheat, 56 pounds to a bushel of barley. (And, for those who are interested, there are 2.2 pounds to a kilogram.) Our schoolteachers never informed us why it should be different for different grains, or what possible practical significant it might have anyway. The point, of course, is that a bushel is a measure of volume, the size of a bag, and each grain has its own specific density. Sewing bags was tough and hard, because the grain had to be pushed and packed in firmly, and the edges of the bag sewn up tightly. Alf wasn't put onto the machinery, such as the header.
     In their younger days, it appeared to have been all fun and games. Before the age of ten, "I think we got away with doing nothing." They were "supposed to bring the wool in, and things like that." However, she did recall how, once when she was quite young, she and Olga got on top of a wagon of firewood and completely emptied it, by each taking one end of a log  and rolling it over. Of course, when their grandfather visited, he put all of them to work, and at least handed out compliments if they did it right. He would even make them stand on a box in order to reach the sink to do the washing up. (And remember, there was no hot running water. Cold water issued from a tap connected to the rain tank. If you wanted hot water, you heated it on the wood stove. Also, there were no detergent powders, just soap. When detergents finally came on the market, housewives were aghast because they produced no suds, and they had blithely assumed that it was the suds which did the work. The manufacturers had to add completely useless and unnecessary sudsing agents to satisfy them. They still do.)
     The boys were also required to set the table, bring in the firewood, and feed the fowls. Alf also milked the cows before going to school in the morning. Of course, the girls were completely idle. They would try their hand at cleaning up the house and ironing, but "don't ever believe that girls work in the country." And remember, she finished school at age fourteen, so that left a certain amount of free time. "Getting ready to go to a dance  ... that was work!"

New Responsibilities

     Just the same, the family was growing, and at about the age of fourteen, she took on some of the responsibility of taking care of the younger ones. (As you may have noticed from earlier chapters, there were not an inconsiderable number of ways young country children could get themselves injured, so I suppose having them tended by someone who had survived to the mid-teens might be an advantage.) A workmate of mine who had ten children once explained that every one of the older children had a younger one for whom he/she was responsible in the areas of dressing, feeding, and preparing for school, so I posed the question: "How did you organize that enormous brood of yours?"
     "Well," she replied, "you don't have a brood just thrust upon you." It developed gradually. No-one really organized them, and at the age of sixteen, when her youngest sister was born, Mum spontaneously took over the tasking of tending the laundry. She herself was energetic, and so were Lil and Hilda, when the time came, but it took her a couple of years to get Olga, the daughter next after her, to pull her weight. "Aunt Olga," she claimed, "was the laziest creature alive," although she had got into the working habit by the time she was married. But I will say nothing further against Aunt Olga. When I was a boy we were very poor, and she used to assist us financially.

Laundry

     Washing clothes: you have no idea what it was like. Yes, there were such things as washing machines - they had been around in one form or another for a long time - but apart from being expensive, they had to be plugged into the electricity mains, something distinctly absent from the farm on the Riverina. No, washing clothes was definitely a hands-on activity. What Mum particularly hated was the men's dungarees, or jeans. Heavily stained with the rich soil on which their livelihood depended, they could only be cleaned by forceful scrubbing on a corrugated washboard prior to soaking. The initial dirt having been removed, everything would then go into a big copper vessel known, appropriately as a "copper", along with soap (no detergent then) and boiling water. A big, heavy wooden stick would then serve to poke them down. (I remember such a copper and stick from my early boyhood, but before I was very old, it was replaced by a machine.)
     Soapy water was precious; it had to be recycled for other washing. Then the washing would have to be rinsed in clear water, and the water squeezed out of the clothes by forcing them through a pair of rollers called a mangle. Again, I remember such devices from my own boyhood. (Also, according to my mother, the well water was very "hard" when it came to washing.)
     Of course, when we talk about boiling the clothes, let's not forget that there was neither electricity nor gas to heat the water. It all had to be done with firewood. The woodheap in front of the house is also part of my memories of my visits to the farm, but I must admit, it never occurred to me to ask where it came from. I gather it could be collected from the paddocks, although they were practically treeless as far as I could see. The trees had been mostly ringbarked and chopped down in the early days of the homestead. Indeed, I was informed that, although the farm had been cut out of a subdivided property, the whole area had been timbered when Grandpa took over, and he had to remove them before he could even consider cultivation.
     Much to my surprise, chopping wood was not a task limited to males. Mum herself confessed to never being much good at it, but her own mother could make the chips fly like a man. It was not as if she initially intended to do it, but she practised it before she was married. (As for me, I'm like lightning; I never strike the same place twice.)

Ironing

     By now you will have realised that washing clothes was pretty much an all-day job. And since wash-and-wear garments were yet to be invented, the next task was ironing. Now, remember, no electricity! Instead, they made do with a flat iron - but the very latest one, with a clip-on handle. Actually, there were more than one; they came in three sizes: baby, medium, and large. And they had to be heated up on the stove, which implied that ironing was one more task assigned to the kitchen. But how would you know that it was the right temperature: hot enough to remove the wrinkles, but not too hot to scorch the cloth? "Well, you use common sense." On you could put it up against your cheek; she had watched her mother do so. Or you could spit on it. When the iron required cleaning, beeswax could be applied.
     When Mum was her late teens (ie in the late 1920s), her mother acquired a petrol iron. At this point, I wish I could copy the tone of voice my mother used when I asked her what on earth that was.
     "Don't you people know anything?" she wailed.
     "No!"
      She then provided a detailed description which I could not follow - and the occasional pictures you can find on the internet are of little help. Essentially, it came with an attachment for petrol and methylated spirits. The latter, when lit, served as a primer to heat up the petrol, and the attachment clipped on, in order to provide an even temperature over the iron. "That was very modern - just before the war," said Mum - which tends to contradict her previous statement. Mum had already left home in the years just before the war.

Other Activities

     As far as beds were concerned, I assume that the older children made their own. The only information I could obtain was that, with nine children, there could not be nine beds. Presumably, doubling up was necessary. Anyway, by the time Doug was born, Alf was attending high school and boarding in town, so that was one less sleeping place to worry about - until he came home.
     You might, however, be interested to learn about the drinking water. Of course, these are the days of the plastic water bottle, but their limitations are obvious. When you've taken a walk in the hot sun, or are cavorting on the beach, and you feel the urge to quench your thirst, you discover that the water has turned luke warm from the same sun which gave you the thirst in the first place. In the olden days, the men went out into the paddocks with a larger water bag made of canvas. Since canvas is porous, it would be permanently damp with the water seeping through and evaporating. This was not a defect in the plan, but its whole purpose. You would lose some water, but what remained would remain refreshingly cool.
     Well, the house itself possessed a much larger canvas bag - of the order of a metre in length. In the morning it would be filled with tank water, and then hung up in the shade - most likely on the verandah - to provide a cool drink to any thirsty soul passing by. Mum also found it she could set jelly in it because, remember, these were the days before refrigeration.

Lunch for the Men

     Back in 1969, I went on a bus trip with my mother, and I remember how she would glance at the fields we were passing and provide a quick estimate of the number of sheep present in each. So when her own father needed to count the sheep, he was prepared to let his daughters round them up and bring them in. But they weren't allowed to visit any such rough places as stockyards, and she always resented never having been present at a stock sale.
     However, when the girls had become teenagers, it suited them to ride out into the open paddocks to deliver lunch to the men. Nevertheless, her own mother considered it unladylike. "All right," said her husband, "I'll just get a lunch boiler." That cured her, because it would have meant more work for her. But the men were not allowed to see the girls barelegged.
    Mum, remember, was born in 1909, so at this point, you will need to know the standards of female attire applicable to the era. I shall therefore quote from that expert of the time, Barbara Cartland. As she explained in We Danced All Night,

Pictures of the twenties show us with short skirts. But these, like everything else, developed slowly and took some years to rise. Here is the actual rate:
     1919-23: Skirt just above the ankles.
     1924     :  Up to the calf.
     1925     :  Just below the knees.
     1926     : To the knees, but no further!

     On the farm, as teenagers, they wore dresses, not split skirts, and certainly not trousers. My mother even made her own underwear, constructed of stronger material than the run-of-the-mill panties, because riding tended to wear out such panties. You will also appreciate that you cannot ride a horse clad in an undivided skirt or dress without the garment riding up to some extent, so stockings were de rigeur. In fact, Mum never let her father see that she was going to town without stockings until she was about forty. But they were a nuisance at home. Mum would deliver the lunch about 9 o'clock, then ride home, remove her stockings, and throw them over the bed, or whatever. But one day, when the time came to return, she was unable to find one of them. Propriety insisted that the hired hands never see her unstockinged legs, so she rode in such a fashion that her bare leg was always turned away from the men. They must have wondered what she was on about.

     So there you have the relaxed life of the teenage country girl of the the 1920s. But Mum was planning her escape. She wanted to see the world, and the best way to do so appeared to become a nurse. Of course, she hadn't been to high school, so she spent her time researching the information she'd need for her entrance qualifications. Her father didn't approve, of course. He had been in hospital in his youth, and he had seen how hard the nurses worked. It wouldn't be so bad, he suggested, if she could board at some religious institution set up for young ladies. Eventually, he agreed that she could go when she turned twenty-one. In fact, she waited until she was twenty-two.
     After that, she really had to work.

Now, forward to the last chapter

or back to the index.

The Passing of an Era

Aged 91 years and 9 months

           The Riverina Girl left the Riverina at the age of 22, and lived a full and long life. Too long, in fact. She spent her final two years in a nursing home, suffering from severe dementia. While there, she would often talk of going back to Wagga, which she appeared to confuse with Brighton, her home for the previous 46 years. It was a blessing when the tragedy was cut short by a fall from bed, which led to a broken leg, requiring an operation.  The ensuring immobility then led to pneumonia, which mercifully brought her life to an end at the age of 97 years.

          The following is therefore taken from the eulogy I gave at her funeral. All that was left was to celebrate her life. She had certainly been the major influence on my own life, and most of my general attitude to social issues was inspired by her rather forthright comments during my childhood.

One of the minor things I miss about her is that I will now never taste the celebrated biscuits she used to make all the time. Once I took them back to Sydney with me, and they became so popular, that one of the girls asked for the recipe. It turned out to be something like: “You take a handful of this, and a bit of that, and another handful of that”… and so forth.

“Clare Smith,” a friend once said, “is one of life’s classic characters.” One could go on and on about her foibles. For example, all house and garden pests were regarded as my personal possessions. She would say such things as: “Your sparrows have been eating my seeds”, or refer to “your cockroaches” or “your spiders”.

And one of the foibles I discovered when I was very little. Whenever she told an anecdote, she wouldn’t trim it down to the essentials, but would start off two or three of generations before, and then ramble on and on till you had to exclaim: “For heaven’s sake, Mum! Get to the point!” On the other hand, she was totally impatient when listening to anecdotes herself. If you were telling a story, no matter how brief, you would only have to pause at the end of a sentence, for her to jump in eagerly with: “Well, what happened then?”

Hopefully, this story won’t be as rambling as hers were. Mum was born in 1909 at Wagga Wagga, the first girl in the family, the result being that she acquired the nickname of Girl. In fact, when writing Christmas cards, she had to remember what the recipients used to call her: Girl, Margaret, Margy, or Clare. She adopted her middle name, Clare because she couldn’t bear hearing her first name shortened to Maggie.

There were nine in her family, and at that time it was considered unusual to have so many survive to adulthood. They almost lost Mum before she went to school. She was so sick she was hospitalised for 10 days. She remembered that because, although she was too young to count to 10, she drew four dots on the wall with a pencil, and “one in the middle”, then another four, and another one in the middle.

Sometime in the 1980s I realised that her childhood years represented an age and a world which has now disappeared, so I got her memories recorded on tape, but only a few can be mentioned now. She developed an abiding passion for horses, and she rode her last horse at the age of 83, in Mexico. Just before she went into a nursing home, when her dementia was growing acute, she used to keep Desmond Morris’ book, Horsewatching on the table to thumb through, as her favourite book, and it was the only one she actually took into the nursing home.

She also acquired a passion for reading, and told me how, when she was young, she used to be afraid she’d die before she read all the books in the world. Which was a losing battle, I’ll agree. But she was fortunate that she and I had similar tastes in books – especially history and travel – so in later years she never needed to buy a book. She would just walk into my room and search my bookshelf for anything that looked promising. In fact, I remember a time both of us took the train into town, and spent the time talking excitedly about books we had just read on Eskimos, and I wondered what anybody listening in must have thought.
           She also had a passion for gardening. Often, she would work the whole day in the garden. Even on her "non-gardening days", she said, she would devote two or three hours to the occupation. It was not work, in her mind, but a hobby. Her orange trees produced so much fruit, that they were collected in buckets, and had to be given away. At other times, for months on end, I would be taking to work a box of strawberries - admittedly, small ones - as part of my lunch. As for flowers: well, one year early in our marriage, whenever we visited her, we would come back with a huge bouquet, without leaving any obvious gaps in the beds. Even in her last days at home, when she was already suffering severely from dementia, the next door neighbour testified that she was in the garden "all day, every day".

But getting back to the old days, she used to talk about how she was boarding with her Aunt Ada, who had a chiming clock. It used to drive her mad that, whenever she was trying to get to sleep, the wretched clock would chime a quarter hour, then twice on the half hour, then three times on the ¾ hour, and finally the hour itself.

She often used to talk about her experiences as an unregistered nurse, first at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and later at a private hospital run by a Matron Jones, whom she always admired. One of the matron's sayings she would often quote was: "I would rather be taken in than refuse help to a genuinely needy person." Mum had to give it up because of sickness, but it always remained in her heart as the lost career she wished she could have kept. Only later did it occur to me to ask the question, “Mum, since you left school at 14, how did you manage to pass the entrance examinations for nurse’s training?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just read up everything in my spare time.”

Even at that stage, she had a spirit of adventure. At one point she was planning to buy a few sheep as the nucleus of a herd. Later, in 1938, she took a cruise which she often used to talk about. First, there was the rail journey to Sydney, costing a whole £2/10/- , then by ocean liner to the exotic foreign capital of Brisbane, where the natives lived in houses on stilts, then to the Whitsunday Islands, and finally to Nouméa.

Then in 1939, she came up with the ultimate plan. She and her sister, Lil decided to take a trip to Brisbane and look for work there. Now, remember, this was when Brisbane was still an exotic foreign capital, before the Pacific Highway became the major thoroughfare it now is, before motels became the norm, and when towns in between were a lot smaller and rarer. They actually intended to ride all the way from Sydney on bicycles, and camp by the side of the road. Unfortunately (she said), the war intervened. Even in later life, she never acknowledged that there was anything extraordinary about that plan.
         During the war she worked in a munition factory and an aircraft factory. Before that, she had become a professional milliner.

Syd and Clare, not long after their wedding in 1947.

         After the war? Well, let me fast forward and tell you a story. Once I invited a pretty girl home for lunch, and she and Mum got into conversation. Halfway through, Mum casually commented: “Long ago, I learnt the lesson with men: either marry them quickly or get rid of them. Don’t just let it drag on and on.” I immediately cringed, and thought: “Why’d she have to say that? She’s supposed to be on my side.” And sure enough, the girl decided to get rid of me. Much later, when I was bringing Esther over, I said to her, “This time don’t tell her your philosophy of either marrying them quickly or dumping them. Though,” I added, “with this girl it might have the opposite effect.” (We were engaged a month or so later.)

Clare with Malcolm (eldest) and Warren

Anyhow, it was a philosophy which kept her single until the age of 38, when she married Syd Smith – thereby ensuring she had two sons, at the age of 40 and 42½ respectively. What a way to solve a mid-life crisis! At first they had a thriving bakehouse business, but when they lost it in 1952 they entered the phase that most dominated my childhood: we were poor. It wasn’t that Warren and I suffered too much from this; from personal experience, I can confirm that poverty doesn’t harm a child. But it was certainly a hard row for my parents to hoe. For example, above the kitchen sink we used to have a collection box for the Spastic Children, but Mum remembered having to raid it for small change on more than one occasion to make ends meet. I once even heard her let slip the phrase, “the worst years of my life”.
            My dad passed away in 1969. She was to be a widow longer than she was a wife. However, I am getting ahead of myself.

In 1959 she got a part time job cleaning St Margaret’s and St Nicholas’ churches, in the Anglican parish of Sandgate, which she would do every week without fail, even taking off time from the cannery, because it was her one steady job. She only stopped when it was cancelled in 1981, when she was 72 years old, and since there was no public transport, she used to walk from Sandgate to Shorncliffe and back. Then, as we boys went to high school, producing more and more expenses, and particularly after Dad went on an invalid pension, she took more and more seasonal work at the Golden Circle cannery. I’ve worked there, so I can tell you what it entailed: it meant standing up for eight hours, slicing pineapples in sweltering heat and humidity, while the juice trickled down her apron and gumboots. She worked her fingers to the bone, and often she would come home utterly exhausted, and still have to prepare dinner and undertake some degree of housework.

Nevertheless, Mum was most upset when the cannery ceased employing anyone over the age of 70, because by then she was using it to finance her holidays.

As an example of what she was like: in 1969, at the age of 60, Mum went with me on bus tour of Tasmania with a bunch of student teachers – so everybody was 40 years younger than her. We all had to camp in YMCA halls and similar venues, and she took it completely in her stride that she had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the hard floors, without even an airbed. Once she and the younger ladies slept in a greenhouse between rows of plants, while we boys slept in the washroom. However, when it got too cold, she bought a pair of green stockings – which she kept for more than 20 years, I might add. The next day, the group decided to liven things up by appointing a sergeant-at-arms, and one of the first people to be fined 20c was Clare Smith – because research had shown that the sexiest colour for stockings was green.

Two years later, in 1971, a developer offered to buy the 6 acres she and Dad had purchased in Bensville, near Gosford, years before. It was rather amusing. She wrote to her brother Alf, who was a solicitor in New South Wales, asking him to do the conveyancing, and her letter crossed with one from Alf, which ended: “PS: When are you going to sell that useless piece of land at Bensville?” The result was that she paid off the house, and then took a 5-month cruise around the world.

That was the start of a 21-year Indian summer, in which she did what she had always wanted to do: travel – mostly overseas. What it meant to her might be gauged by what she said to the geriatrician, when she was being examined for Alzheimer’s disease: “I’ve had a good life. I’ve travelled a lot. But now it’s over.” And, of course, the actual travelling was only part of it. There was also the anticipation and planning and, afterwards, waiting for the slides to come back, and watching them. Once, when there was nothing on TV, we took out a set of slides at ½ past 8 or 9 at night. Just then, a couple of Mormons arrived. So we invited them to the slide show.

But Mum always laughed when she mentioned how people would say to her, “Aren’t you lucky, Mrs Smith, to be able to travel!” Luck had nothing to do with it. It was due to hard work at the cannery and the church, and frugal saving from her pension and my board.

There are endless stories about Mum’s behaviour on her travels. One was how she climbed a staircase of 500 steps in Greece, I think it was, because there might be something worthwhile at the top – but then, she was always one to climb over a gate rather than open it. When she went camping on Cape York Peninsula at the age of 77, she was always involved in some minor crisis, but the big discomforts of camping didn’t faze her. When we came to the far-flowing Jardine River, she joined the rest of us, and floated down the river on her airbed. I’ve also got a slide of the same trip of her fording a river above the Roaring Meg Falls by holding onto a rope.

And one thing she was famous for: despite the extra weight, she would always pack a small billy, miniature stove, and solid fuel. Then, it didn’t matter whether she was in a 5-star luxury hotel or a zero-star dive in the Middle East, she would take it to the bathroom and boil some tea. Once, when she and Hilda were in Turkey, they saw some eggs in a market, and they promptly bought them and boiled them in the hotel.

As you might expect therefore, one day when there was a gathering of the clan at Melbourne, the conversation got around to the antics of the elder sister. Hilda explained it this way:

“Girl told me that, if you can’t find a small billy, what you do is you take an empty peach tin, punch a couple of holes in it, and then thread a piece of wire through the holes, and you have something big enough for a single cup of tea.”

“Did you say a peach tin?” one of the other ladies asked.

“Well, it could be a jam tin,” said Hilda.

At that point, her neice, Hazel virtually threw up her hands and cried out: “You’re all a bunch of raving ratbags.”

When she was well over 70, she decided to paint the outside of the house. I told her I’d do it on the weekend if she’d wait, but she insisted on doing it herself. But since she had trouble with neck pain at the time, she graciously left it to me to do the upper corners. I told this to Christine when I sent her a birthday card. Back came the reply: “Here I was, busy painting the ceiling, and thinking that, at the age of 40, I was getting too old for this, when along came your letter…”

At St Margaret's Anglican Church, Sandgate

          For more than 43 years she had a pet dog, and in her latter years she was known in the neighbourhood, even to strangers, as the lady who walked the dog. Of course, I also had to do it on the weekends, and one day a little boy asked me: “Is vat your dog?”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

To which he replied: “I fought it was your grandmuvver’s.”

Which made Mum complain: “Once I used to be known by my husband. Then I was known by my son. Now I’m known by my dog.”

But at least she had a good innings. She always said it was due to drinking the water she boiled her vegetables in. Perhaps we should all try it.
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