Chapter 24 Enterprise

                                                         Chapter 24  Enterprise

In 1956, Dad was inspired to buy the Green Springs butcher shop. Larry was 17. I was amazed at the fantastic job he and Dad did building a slaughterhouse on the farm. It was so solid, so neat, so clean. I felt safe in there, standing on the wide concrete floor beside the high black and white spaced boards. It was still there, solid and majestic, when we left the property years later.

     Dad made arrangements with the previous owner of the butcher shop to spend his last day teaching Larry how to break down a carcass ready for sale in the shop. However, when Larry and Dad arrived at the shop at 5 a.m. they were in for a shock. The butcher had packed up and left in the middle of the night, leaving behind a maggot-ridden hide hanging over the fence and an overflowing toilet down the back. In the shop itself the four quarters of a carcass were hanging on hooks, ready to be prepared for sale.

     Dad telephoned an old retired butcher he knew who lived nearby and explained their predicament. The old man generously came into the shop and spent half a day teaching Larry the butchering trade, returning for a few hours the following day to teach him the art of making sausages. So that was it. Larry had done his butchering apprenticeship!

    I hung around the butcher shop in the afternoons after school doing odd jobs and getting into trouble.

     “For God’s sake don’t be a bloody nuisance!”

    I ruined a second watch stirring brine with my arm.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
     In time I made up my mind to watch Dad slaughtering a beast. With the bullock in the centre of the slaughterhouse, he shot the Hereford with the .22 rifle right between the eyes at practically point-blank range. It dropped like a stone.The beast’s throat was cut and copious blood ran freely into a deep purpose-built pit. I was fascinated watching his skill with a razor sharp knife as he carefully removed the hide.

    The carcass now skinned, he winched it up to hang by the hind legs to enable the gut to be removed. The next job was to saw down through the middle of the backbone, dividing it neatly in half.  Eventually the two halves were cut in half again, leaving four quarters to be transported to the butcher shop. The skull was chopped open to extract the brains before it was disposed of.

    There was a water tank outside the slaughterhouse and Dad spent quite a deal of time scrubbing the cement with a large broom and returning the building to a pristine condition.  As I never saw him assist in the house unless Mum was very ill, I was impressed with the job he did.

     When Larry performed the breaking down of a carcass, he carefully removed the marrow in a long string. Mum crumbed and fried brains and marrow for Larry and me because we were so fond of them.

    The final job Dad had to do at the slaughterhouse, was salting the hide. He spread it out and rubbed handfuls of coarse salt into the raw side of the skin, and then folded it carefully. Eventually it would be transported by train to the tannery in Brisbane.

    The house that went with the butcher shop was the best thing about it for Mum and me. A huge improvement on the old slab house on the farm, it was right next door to the shop, and several acres of land went with it. Mum was ecstatic about the weatherboard house.  It had nice bedrooms, a kitchen, lounge, and a large breakfast room closed in with louvre windows, as well as two rainwater tanks. She even had a proper laundry and a bathroom!

     Larry turned out to be a good butcher and enjoyed it, and Dad was strict about cleanliness in the shop. They never watered the mince to expand it; nowadays I believe it is legal to sell mince with water added.

     Looking back, I can’t imagine how my mother managed the telephone exchange, the farmhouse, and the butcher shop house. It must have been a huge job for her. Though we mostly lived ‘in town,‘ Mum had to be back at Gilman Creek for the telephone exchange at eight a.m, and on Sundays she had to be there between nine and eleven a.m.

                                                         
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    Eventually, due to growing numbers at the school, a young female assistant arrived by train. We were all excited; this was big-time; we were no longer just a ‘one teacher’ school!

    The most complicated thing about having a second teacher was that they had to be boarded somewhere. Undaunted by the prospect of the extra workload for my mother, Dad  volunteered to board the teacher the second year. Mum had only agreed on the understanding that it would be a male teacher, and the committee made sure we got a male, as accommodation was scarce. The young lady was transferred, and a young male took her place.

    Other families shared the responsibility of boarding the teacher and he spent six months here and six months there. It was difficult while he was at our place, because Mum  didn’t arrive back from the farm until after eight o'clock at night, when she had to face cleaning up the kitchen etc and getting the teacher and us kids a meal. Sometimes I cooked the dinner but I don't think I did a very good job of it, because I remember him complaining about the steak being tough.

    On weekends Mum washed and ironed a week's worth of white shirts and other laundry for him, and did the family’s washing and ironing. Men didn't wear coloured shirts in those days, or help with any house work!
   
    I did a little to help, wiping dishes and setting the table, but that's all Mum would allow me to do. I wasn’t allowed to wash dishes because it would ‘ruin my hands.’ I wasn’t allowed to hang out washing because the sun would ‘ruin my eyes.’ I think only once she asked me to make my own bed and I made a dog's breakfast of it!

    One day she agreed to let me make starch, and I ended up in tears of frustration. In the end I found it was a little like making custard, and I never forgot it after that. Mum starched tablecloths and serviettes, tea towels, doilies and dressing table sets, and some items of clothing. I found out that if tea towels are not ironed--and startching is even better-- they leave behind fluff on the dishes. Of course, dishwashers weren’t around in those days, and we didn’t even have a kitchen sink.

    Mum’d say, "You'll learn housework soon enough when you get married!"

    I found there was much more life in Green Springs. There were people to talk to, and shops were close. I loved the weekends most though when Mum was at the house a lot, and we spent long hours talking together while she worked. We were always very close.

    I often went to the shops for her. The country at that time used Imperial measures--pounds and ounces--and if we bought potatoes it would always be seven pounds. 112 pounds equals one Hundredweight (cwt.) and twenty-eight pounds equals one Quarter. Seven pounds was a quarter of a Quarter.

    But if Mum wanted feminine napkins it was a different story. She gave me a note with the instructions, "If Mrs Smith serves you, give her the note. If Mr Smith serves you, ask for a pound of butter.”

    If Mrs Smith did come out to serve me, she would wrap the packet of napkins in brown paper and hand them to me surreptitiously. God forbid that anybody should see that embarrassing purchase!

    There were no self-serve supermarkets in those days, not even in the city. If you walked into a shop the shopkeeper served you and obtained whatever you wanted from the shelves behind the counter, packing them into a brown paper bag or cardboard box. In a drapery store they were wrapped in brown paper. Most big shops had a huge role of brown paper in a holder with a cutter on the counter. At our local shops Mum gave the owner a grocery list and waited while it was packed for her. The groceries were bought ‘on tick’ and paid for at the end of the month.

    One day I broke a cardinal rule by spending the change on a packet of columbines, a colourful box of little caramels. All lollies were  a luxury, and the columbines cost about two shillings and sixpence. I never had money of my own to spend on such frivolous items and I knew I’d done wrong. Straightaway I felt ashamed... untrustworthy, and I knew I’d let my mother down. I rushed home and told her how sorry I was.  She was very forgiving, but warned me not to let it happen again.

    When the first male assistant teacher arrived we discovered he had an interest in art. He soon gave us art lessons. What a joy it was to learn something so different. I learnt how to draw a tree properly, with the shadow down one side. I loved it and wished we could have done more.

    He was the first teacher to board with us for six months, and I remember him drawing large black dragons in black Indian ink on white sweatshirts for himself and his girlfriend.
He became friends with Larry who was nineteen. Larry had a jeep with no top and sometimes the boys went spotlighting.

    “Want to come along Gid?” Larry asked one night.

    “Sure”

    Wow...this was big-time, standing up in the jeep with the wind in my hair.

    But after witnessing the still-warm body of a possum, twitching on the ground after it crashed down onto the dead leaves and stones, I’d had enough spotlighting!

     The second male teacher to board with us really did not like teaching. When he was leaving Green Springs School, he was extremely apprehensive about where he’d be transferred.

    Sitting at the table enjoying a cup of tea with him one day, Mum asked, “Why did you became a teacher, Richard?”  He replied that his mother and his grandmother had been teachers, and they naturally expected him to be a teacher too. He felt he had no choice.
   
    “Are you looking forward to going to a one teacher school?” she asked.

    He was horrified, but from experience, we knew that was how the education department worked. After our school, they were usually transferred to their own one teacher school.

    There was a skill Mum had which she never talked about, and that was the ability to read teacups.
   
     “Oh, I’ll read your teacup,” she offered.
   
     She held his cup and peered inside. “Oh yes...definitely.You’re going to Turrumbilla...one teacher school...I see you’re getting a letter tomorrow...long brown envelope.” she mused.

    One day I asked her how she did it. "It has nothing to do with the tea leaves.  It's just something that comes to you as soon as you look in the cup.”

    Later on when I got married and was pregnant with our first child, Mum read my cup and was upset by what she saw, but kept it to herself.  I miscarried that baby at four months gestation.
 
    Many years on I asked her to read my cup and she refused, "No I won’t read your cup.   I’m too frightened.”

     “Why?”
   
    “I saw your first miscarriage."

    "What did you see?"

    "I saw the basinette, with a cover right over it."

    Even in her eighties, though she rarely practised it then, Mum decided to read the cups of her morning tea friends, and saw that one of them had a crippled hand. She kept it to herself but soon after, the woman had a stroke, and her hand became crippled. Mum was terribly frightened by the episode, and felt she had sinned against God, and after that never read teacups again.

 Once again, I didn’t inherit the skill.