Chapter 11 Joy to be Had

                                                         Chapter 11 Joy to be Had

Larry and his cousins were similar in age, but older than me, so I guess I was just a big nuisance to them. When I did manage to infiltrate the group, it was more than one small step for mankind!

 The boys built a billy cart which we called a trolley. From memory, it epitomised the word contraption. Basically just a wooden box on wobbly old pram wheels, it had a rope to steer the front wheels but no brakes. One boy sat in the box holding the rope at the top of the hill, while a couple of the other boys, bent over double and giggling, gave him a push off. Away went the trolley, rattling down the hill and gathering speed. It was delicious fun, but the only way to stop the cart was to steer into the gutter. The greater the momentum of the trolley and its occupant, the more likelihood there was that it would tip over at the bottom when driven into the gutter. The hapless, hysterical occupant would be spilled out onto  the gravel. The memory makes my knees and elbows hurt! 
 

The boys tried hard to get away on their own, but I usually sensed they were leaving and tore out of the house after them. I loved riding in that trolley, but running across the paddock trying to catch up, I frequently fell over in a patch of prickles, screaming for the boys to come back and pull them out of my feet, knees, and hands. The boys would slowly turn around and come back to rescue me, patiently extracting all the prickles, and resigning themselves to having me join their game. Poor Larry often got stuck riding in the cart with me.
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Curiously, no bathroom had been included in the house. This was probably due to having only one tap indoors, leading from the tank into the kitchen. Personal hygiene was carried out in one of the bedrooms, or outside the back door, using an enamel hand basin on a rickety bench.  A tap at the bottom of the tank was also used for drinks and for filling buckets. I suppose the space outside the back door could be called the laundry, because it was roofed over and had a set of concrete washtubs.

Hanging on a nail on the faded grey weatherboard wall outside the kitchen, was an enormous–I thought it was enormous–galvanised bath tub, which Mum brought inside for me to bath in. She poured in cold water from a saucepan or other vessel and then hot water from the simmering kettle. 

I am renowned for bath-time in my early childhood. One evening I stood watching as my mother poured boiling water into the bath from the kettle. Fascinated by the smooth twisted column of water, I suddenly stuck out my hand with the  palm upwards to find out what it felt like. Mum yelled...but too late! I screamed in pain. She flew into action covering my hand with butter, followed by a thick layer of bicarbonate of soda. I can't remember the burn ever being much of a problem, although I doubt the treatment was the operative factor in the healing!

 To keep me warm in winter, Mum often put the tub behind the stove. When I was finished washing myself one night, {I only did this once,}I stood up and bent over, burning the cheek of my bottom on the stove. Again I yelled blue murder and suddenly found myself head down over my mother’s lap, while she patted the burn with Rawleigh’s Antipain, a pink solution from a bottle. Once more, the burn healed without incident.


                            Mary Mack, dressed in black,
                            Silver buttons down her back,
                            She loves coffee, she loves tea,
                            She loves sitting on a... Chinaman’s knee (No PC in those days!)

 Our cousin Cathy loved to visit the farm. She was a bit older than my brother, and she spent many happy holidays riding with Larry, or hanging out in the dairy while he was working, but I loved her and looked up to her because she treated me like a little sister. Cathy and Larry were so gentle with the cows that some of them became pets. The photo below shows Bright Eyes, a Jersey with beautiful big black eyes and long eyelashes. She patiently tolerated all our hugging and patting. 

Cathy was a most valuable help to Mum at my bath time, and she muses about Mum reciting nursery rhymes to distract me when I was screaming my protests. My favourite rhyme was Mary Mack. It went: Mary Mack, dressed in black...Silver buttons down her back.. but Mum would say, “Green buttons down her back." 

I’d scream out, "NOOOO! SILVER buttons down her back!" I’m surprised I survived my childhood!

Apparently this tactic was repeated until I was washed and dressed with my hair brushed. Everyone must’ve heaved a sigh of relief when that little pantomime was over.

I never received many presents for Christmas and birthdays. Children didn't in those days. Luckily, besides the present my parents gave me, I always got something in the mail from Aunt Lu. One year she sent bath salts, and the day they arrived, I demanded my mother let me try them. I nagged until she filled the tub with water and sprinkled in some of the scented bath salts. What a disappointment! As soon as I sat down in the bath it felt like I was sitting on course sand. I decided that bath salts were highly overrated!

A favourite anecdote of Mum's resulted from when I was two or three years old. A couple on a property some miles away came to visit for the day. Betsy and Mum were in close conversation, when I came up to them with a pair of my shoes that no longer fitted. 

"Mummy, why won't these shoes fit me?"

"They’re too small."

    It wasn't long before I returned . "Mummy, why won't these shoes fit me?"

"They're too small."

Yet again I interrupted Mum and Betsy’s conversation.

 The third time Mum replied, "Your feet are too big!"

"Oh," I said, apparently satisfied, because I never returned.

 Betsy was thoroughly amused at Mum’s insight, repeating the anecdote more often than required!

 At three or four I moved from a cot in my parents room to a double bed with tall wooden ends, feeling very small. Most nights on the farm were pitch black and I lay in bed feeling lonely and frightened out of my wits. Plagued by a terrible fear of African animals, I  imagined they were there in the room with me. I stared into the  shadowy darkness, imagining huge creatures looming over me.

I knew if I walked right through them, I would be safe, but it took a while to gather enough courage to strike out on my own, and when I finally negotiated the dark, there I would stand silently beside my sleeping mother, too shy to disturb her. After a few minutes,  with a sharp intake of breath, she would wake and put her arm out and lift me in beside her, where I would snuggle in happily and sleep peacefully for the rest of the night. Dad was okay with it if he was not disturbed, so Mum took care to keep me very close, between her and the edge of the bed.

Mostly, as I ran around the farm playing, I had bare feet. The cleared area between the house and the dairy still contained some tiny stumps in the ground, and this was the main area where I ran and played. Frequently I kicked one of my toes on these little stumps and the skin of the top of one toe would be partially lifted off. I screamed in pain and limped home to Mum, holding up the front of my foot as blood dripped from the injury. 

Mum became an expert at bush first aid. Old worn singlets were never thrown away.  After they'd been washed and hung in the sun to dry, she cut them into long bandages of different widths, rolled and stored them away. Her favourite cure-all to bathe wounds was potassium permanganate, or Condy’s Crystal. I sat on the back step with my foot in the enamel basin of warm water.

Mum sprinkled in a few of the crystals and urged me to: 'make the water pink.' It worked to distract me from the pain. If it was bleeding profusely, I would be encouraged to make the water red by letting it bleed, thus reassuring me that the bleeding wasn’t a bad thing. Following warm bathing, she would dab on acriflavin, a bright yellow antiseptic, and to finish off, MAC, her favourite ointment, would be smeared on, before the dressing and a bandage. She swore by this treatment and cured many a wound with it.

The acriflavin dyed the skin bright yellow. I’ve since learned its counterpart was probably mercurochrome, about which two friends have told me funny stories. When one was very small, she was riding on the back of a three wheeled trike, standing on the platform at the back while some other child peddled. Her hard-soled shoes slipped off the back and she fell, but she didn't let go and was dragged along in the dirt, grazing her face. For six weeks she was forced to go to school with her face red with mercurochrome, and soon earned the nickname of 'Red Indian.'

The other girl related that when she was 15 and wanted to dye her hair, her mother refused to allow it so she did the job herself with mercurochrome! I must have been a very dull child, because nothing so adventurous ever entered my head.

Anyway, thanks probably to the cod liver oil in good old MAC, my singlet-wrapped toes always healed in a few days. Mum was a coper, not a groper, and she faced many a hardship with common sense and  conviction.

     When I reached three or four I was allowed to ride on the slide. Many farmers used a slide on their property in those days. Dad made his using two heavy wide boards, about eight inches by two inches as runners, and then bolting six inch wide boards, across the top to form a platform, about six feet long and four or five feet wide. A steel pipe was used as a spreader under the platform and Dad utilised the steel tyres from an old disused buggy on the property to line the runners.  The slide was pulled by a draught horse harnessed into collar and chains. The huge collar on the horse was made from leather packed with horsehair. The chains were attached from the outsides of the collar to the slide using a stick as a spreader to keep them off the horses’ legs.

  A handy adjunct when farming, slides were used to carry all sorts of things like bundles of firewood, drums of water, and pieces of machinery, from place to place, and Larry or his cousins were often sent on one of these foraging trips to collect firewood.  A horse and slide could penetrate quite a way through the bush, and could negotiate over small stumps without incident. We had an old draught horse called Maud who was particularly quiet, and later another called Olga. Olga was so obliging that if the slide encountered too large an obstacle, she would simply stop and wait for an indication to move again. 

One day, when Larry and his cousins were out on the slide, they were managing a steady pace until suddenly the slide hit a large stump. The boys were all sitting except Larry, who was standing up in charge of the horse. When the slide came to an abrupt halt, Larry was flung forward into the horse’s legs, but faithful old Olga merely stopped and waited for him to extricate himself.

 Eventually Dad’s ingenious slide simply wore out from hard work, and he, like many other farmers, made a new one out of the forked limb of a tree. Dad was a great reader of  Jollife’s Saltbush Bill comics and it wouldn't surprise me if he picked up a few ideas from there, and when I got a bit older, I relished reading some of my dad’s comic reading material.

He had a huge collection of tools, inherited from his father's engineering shop built on the Brisbane River at Tennyson. A qualified fitter and turner, he made good use of those tools as he worked to build up the farm. I remember him greasing lengths of steel around the ends with soft dripping (beef fat from the kitchen,) and casting with dyes to make nuts and bolts. I was fascinated watching the little spirals of steel fall off the end of a steel rod held firmly between the jaws of the vice, as he ground the thread on.

He also had a blacksmith's area set up under a roof at the side of the open slab shed. Feeling important at five years old, I helped him by turning the handle to pump the bellows of the forge until the red hot coals glowed. Then I’d watch enthralled, as he hammered the glowing hot steel, bending it over the anvil. He made hinges for gates and horseshoes etc, using long steel pincers and big heavy hammers. I was in awe of the ringing crash of bouncing steel hammers on the iron anvil. Finally, the glowing hot steel was plunged into a four gallon tin of cold water to cool, where it sizzled and sputtered and shot off clouds of steam. It all impressed me.

One morning I reported to the teacher at school for morning news that, "I turned the forge for Daddy." Today the kids have 'show and tell.'