Country Days

I
SAUNTERED SLOWLY
along the dusty road, kicking loose stones ahead of me. It was a warm day, and I felt as languid as the black and yellow bumble bee droning on the hedge beside me. I sat down on the side of the ditch and watched a ladybird crawl up my bare brown leg. I was on my way to spend a week with my grandmother and was reluctant to arrive.

Every summer my mother encouraged each one of us to spend a week with our grandmother, but as she was a strict disciplinarian who believed that children should behave as adults, I preferred to be at home where the pace was more leisurely. Reluctant as I was, my mother exercised her emotional blackmail about “poor lonely Nanna”, and even though I did not believe one word of it, I still found myself headed in her direction.

Dawdle as I might, I could not drag out the journey any longer and arrived as my uncle was herding the cows into the stalls for milking.

The kitchen of the long, low thatched house was cool after the hot sun outside. As soon as I arrived in the doorway, my grandmother handed me a
white enamel bucket with instructions to go out and collect the eggs.

“Poor lonely Nanna, my eye,” I thought.

I lined the bottom of the bucket with a handful of hay to prevent breakages and carefully placed the eggs on top of each other. One side of the whitewashed henhouse was lined with timber perches, while on the other side a variety of different containers, ranging from rusty tar barrels to orange boxes, served as laying nests.

Balancing my bucket carefully, I took it back to the kitchen, where the next task was cleaning the eggs with a damp cloth and bread-soda. At home this job could be put off to the next day and then the chances were that someone else could get caught for it, but here there was no such luck. Then I had to tidy the kitchen and set the table for the helpers coming in from the milking.

Afterwards I wandered around the deserted farmyard chasing the wild cats in and out through the stable windows. They lived in the straw loft untouched by human hand and they had no children to play with them. My grandmother did not allow them near the kitchen, so they were fed by my uncle in a rusty churn cover after morning and evening milking. Going back into the haggard behind the house, I climbed up into the old apple tree, lay out along one of the branches and looked up at the late evening sky through the different shapes made by the dark green leaves and the big
red sour cooking apples that this tree produced by the bucketful.

In the gathering dusk, my grandmother rapped on the back window of the kitchen, summoning me in to go to bed. I shared her big feather bed that smelt of Sloan's Liniment and camphor balls. I whipped off my short cotton dress, dragged on my nightdress and jumped into the soft down. She hauled me back out to scrub myself in cold water and to kneel down and say my prayers.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Bless the bed that I lie on,

And if I die before I wake

The Lord I give my soul to take.

When I had my night prayers said, I crept back into bed. I lay there and watched her nightly ritual.

First she wound her clock. It had weights and chains, and she pulled down the chains which made a whirring sound as the weights climbed upwards. Then she took off her black bonnet and hung it off the brass knob at the end of the bed. Next the crotchet shawl from around her shoulders was carefully placed over the curved back of a
leather-seated
chair. Her long black apron she untied and folded across the seat of the chair. Then she eased open the buttons down the front of her black satin blouse. There were two long rows of tiny
satin-covered
buttons to be opened, so it took some time as her fingers moved slowly from one to the other, feeling her way along as she looked out the window
across the fields. She commented on the condition of the countryside and the evening sky and forecast tomorrow's weather as a result of her observations.

She draped the blouse over the shoulders of the chair. She untied the waist of her long black skirt; it slid to the floor and she stepped out of it. Carefully she folded its pleats and arranged it across the chair seat over the apron. Now she stood resplendent in a long-sleeved white chemise and flowing red petticoat. I always felt that it was a pity to cover that flaming red petticoat, but somehow I could never imagine my grandmother sporting it anywhere other than in the privacy of her own bedroom. Next the petticoat crumpled in crimson folds at her feet and was picked up to be folded carefully over the skirt. A large navy blue knickers stretched from her waist to the top of her black stockings. She eased up its gathered elasticated legs and snapped open the suspenders of her whalebone corset: three suspenders for each leg, two to the back and one to the front. Then she drew down one side of her knickers and clicked the corset open down along that side, and I counted the clicks as she went along. There was an almost musical rhythm to the clicking, and I challenged myself every night to get my count of the last of the clicks to coincide with the grand finale when she finally whipped it off with a clatter of bone and steel against the iron leg of the bed.

She sat on the side of the bed to unlace her high black boots, which she placed carefully side by side
under her chair; then she rolled down her long, black, knitted stockings. After this her chemise was arched up over her head and a yellow bodice came into view.

The final unveiling was hidden from my eyes as she opened the door of the tall wardrobe and it swung between us. It had a mirror on the door, and so I saw myself behind the black bars of the bed. When she stepped from behind it, she was dressed from neck to toe and wrist in a flowing nightgown.

With each layer she removed, she had become less formidable, and when she undid her long grey hair that she wore coiled on top of her head, it flowed down over her shoulders. She was then transformed from my regal grandmother to a tall, waif-like figure. She peeled the bedclothes back at her side of the bed and sat propped up by large feather pillows. Even though we shared the same bed, I was on a lower plateau as she reposed high above me on a mountain of pillows. She said the rosary and many prayers and taught me one of them. For many nights we laboured over that prayer, and I thought that it was the longest prayer I had ever heard.

Dear angel ever at my side

How loving thou must be,

To leave thy home in heaven above

And guard a little child like me…

There were twenty-six more lines. It was broken up into verses – at least that's what I considered them to be – and we took a verse per night. Finally, from
the sheer power of repetition, she drummed it into my sleepy head. As I learned, my drowsy mind could visualise a huge angel with coloured wings sitting on the brass bars at the bottom of the bed.

She was different then from the daytime grandmother. She told stories of her girlhood and traced the family tree with great detail. I fell asleep to the sound of her voice getting fainter as I dozed off.

My grandmother was a late riser, so I got up early the following morning and escaped before she had a chance to line up jobs for me. My aim was to visit Molly, who lived across the fields. During her meanderings the night before, my grandmother had mentioned that Molly had a grandnephew from America staying with her. I put my ears back at this bit of news and on asking for further details was dismissed with the remark that he was “a nice looking child”. In my grandmother's book, a child could range from a baby to a twenty year old, so I was soon on my way to investigate this visitor from foreign parts.

I came on him suddenly, where he lay stretched out on the headland of the meadow, peering through the tall grass and watching the baby rabbits intently.

“Hi,” he said in surprise, “who are you?”

“Who are you?” I countered.

“I'm Shane,” he said, “and I think that I know who you are because yesterday Aunty Molly said you
were coming. Gee, you are pretty!” he finished in surprise.

When you are thirteen and you consider your mouth to be too big, your hair too straight and your legs too long, anybody who tells you that you are pretty opens a door into a whole new exciting world. When that somebody happened to be male, dark and good looking, it was music to my soul.

As I gazed down at him, stretched out on the grass, I tried to judge if he was as tall as I was. It would be bad for my morale if he had to look up at me.

“Will you stand up?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said in surprise, jumping to his feet.

“Now stand still,” I instructed and stood with my back against his, reaching up with my hand to judge our head levels.

“You're an inch ahead,” I told him.

“Is that important?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “I don't like short boys.”

“Well, glad I passed the test,” he said, looking a bit perplexed; “and now will we watch the rabbits?”

The rabbits, however, had disappeared from view. We spent the rest of the morning creeping silently over rusty gates and across mossy ditches to take the rabbits by surprise and then watch them scamper in all directions when they saw us. Shane was fascinated by the rabbits and I was fascinated by Shane. His black curly hair fell forward over his eyes and he had a habit of running his long, slender fingers through it to comb it backwards. When he laughed,
golden flecks seemed to sparkle in his brown eyes. He laughed a lot and was thrilled and delighted with things that I considered everyday and ordinary. Being with him was full of laughter and fun.

When we got thirsty from the heat of the sun, we crawled down into a deep stream and drank the water by cupping it into our saucered fists. I introduced Shane to birds' nests, and he was like a miner who had struck gold: there was no satisfying his quest for more. Some of the nests had eggs in them, but his ambition now was to find one that had baby birds. Although we searched many ditches and bushes, no nest sheltering young came our way. As we searched we talked. His conversation was full of words that I had never heard before, and he asked me to explain some of my ways of saying things to him. We had a great time trying to understand each other, and I loved his drawling American accent.

Finally it dawned on me that it was well into the afternoon and that my grandmother would be on the rampage, so I brought Shane back with me as an insurance policy against a sermon. The ploy worked because even though she might have felt like wigging my ear, she could not do so without including Shane in the hostilities, and he was after all a visitor. More important still, he was Molly's grandnephew and Molly was her dearest friend.

The following day, hay was drawn in from the meadows to the barn by horse and float. Shane and I sat under the warm galvanised-iron roof of the
haybarn and watched a swallow swish in to feed her young in her mud-encrusted nest perched high in the corner of the arching rafter. She waited until the horse and float left the haggard before she swooped in, snails dangling from her small, sharp beak.

We had gone for drives in the float, bumping around on its hard surface on the way out and coming home legs trailing along the ground at the back. Our bare toes were soothed by the soft grass brushing along beneath us, with the occasional thistle causing us to whip up our damaged legs in agony. Shane had never before gone barefoot and he hooted with delight at the feel of the cool moss beneath his feet.

We were supposed to be helping, lifting up the hay at the base of the load to ease the float in and sometimes packing hay at the back of the barn. But all that day we watched the swallow and hoped that the hay would rise high enough for us to reach its nest.

While the block of hay was low, we could not see into the nest and could only watch as the mother's head disappeared in over the edge and her tail bobbed up and down while she dished out delicacies to her young. Gradually the block of hay rose higher as the horse drew home load after load, and finally late in the evening our straining fingers could touch the rough timber rafters. We gathered together armfuls of crackling hay and piled it high to bridge the gap between us and the roof. Shane
climbed on to the top of the wobbling hay and swung up on to the rafters. I balanced on the peak of the wavering heap and reached towards the hands straining down to pull me up. Grasping long brown fingers, I clambered up beside him on to the warm wooden rafters and leaned forward on all fours to maintain my balance. Care had to be exercised to prevent wooden splinters digging deep into knees and palms. He crept along before me towards the nest. Our rafter crawl took us clear of the hay, and then we were high over the empty space between the hay blocks. I was afraid to look down in case I would slip off the narrow timber and crash on to the float below. It was empty now, propped up on its timber handles, the traces draping across the shafts between which the horse had strained all day, carrying back the wynds from the meadow. We were crawling along with one thought in mind, to peep into the nest and see the baby swallows.

We were rewarded with a flash of yellow gaping beaks as we wobbled, precariously straining forward, wanting to see as much as possible but afraid of losing our balance. Then we reversed back along the rafter and collapsed back down on to the bouncing hay. Shane was delighted to have seen the baby birds and that night he drew sketches of them in the copy book that my grandmother kept behind the clock to keep a record of the egg money.

We spent every day together, and the compulsory week at my grandmother's stretched into a
voluntary month, during which time we explored the countryside and talked for hours, comparing our different worlds. Going to bed at night and watching Nanna unclicking her whalebone corset, I longed for morning so that we could be together again. We were children on the last rung of childhood, reluctant to take the first step into the unknown world of adolescence.