Freedom's Land (23 page)

Worst of all, there was no sign of the teams who came to build the wooden farmhouses. Not a single one had been built for this group. With winter coming on fast, that worried Gil greatly.

The wet season would be a testing time for them all.

Maybe he should suggest people order wood-burning stoves to put in their humpies for the time being. But not all would be able to afford that.

It was a fine, sunny day, if a bit brisk, and Irene got the washing done early. She left it drying on the makeshift line and walked across to see Norah, because she desperately needed to talk to another woman.

Norah was still working on her much larger pile of washing, using a tin tub standing on a small bench and water boiled on the small cooking fire in the lean-to kitchen. She was humming to herself, looking sweaty and ready for a rest, but not unhappy.

Irene called out from across the block and Norah turned, smiling when she saw who it was and waving a hand holding a scrubbing brush covered in suds by way of a greeting.

Janie was peeling potatoes at a rough outdoor table and looked sulky. She didn’t bother to look up until her mother said sharply, ‘Say hello to Mrs Dawson.’

The words came out tonelessly. ‘Hello, Mrs Dawson.’

‘Hello, Janie. I see you’re helping your mother.’

‘I don’t like peeling potatoes.’

Irene looked at Norah, who gave a slight shake of her head and frowned at her daughter.

‘If you’d put the kettle over the fire, Irene love, we could have a nice cup of tea,’ Norah said. ‘I’m nearly ready for one. There’s some clean water from the well in that bucket and there’s a fire in my kitchen.’ She smiled as she said this.

‘It’s a good kitchen, the best of any I’ve seen,’ Irene said enviously as she went into the lean-to. ‘You’ve got it all set up so well.’ Freddie had made her a lean-to of sorts, but hadn’t really finished it off and one side was still open to the weather. She tipped water from the bucket carefully into the kettle. ‘Shall I get some more water from the well?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

‘I’m happy to help. And when you’re finished, maybe we could have a talk?’ She looked meaningfully at Janie.

Norah nodded.

After the washing had been mangled and hung out, Norah suggested Irene help her in the vegetable garden and the two women left Janie to finish peeling the potatoes and carrots.

‘It’s hard to keep on top of the weeding. That winter grass grows so quickly at this time of year. I want to put some more seeds in as soon as Andrew’s fenced in some more land.’

‘You’ve got green fingers.’

Norah laughed and looked down at her hands. ‘Red today from the washing. But I’m enjoying gardening. I’ve not done it before, but it’s so wonderful to eat something you’ve grown yourself. Just wait till you see what I grow next year. More than this! But you didn’t come here to talk of gardening, did you?’

‘No. I need your advice.’ As the two women worked, Irene told her friend how much Freddie had changed since coming here and described his reaction to the news of the coming baby. She was sobbing by the time she finished her tale, felt Norah put her arms round her and leaned against the other woman, taking comfort from her strength.

After a moment or two, however, she straightened up. ‘I shouldn’t burden you with my problems.’

‘What else are friends for?’ Norah gave her another quick hug.

‘It’s just . . . I don’t know what to do about Freddie and the baby.’

‘There’s not much you can do. He’ll grow used to the idea. Didn’t he want children in England?’

Irene frowned. ‘We never talked about it then. It was just us he cared about, I think. When I lost the baby and was so ill, he was so wonderful. He came out here to Australia to make me better. Only . . . he hates it here, absolutely hates it.’

‘Oh dear. I was right then. I said to Andrew that’s why Freddie is unhappy.’

There was silence, then Janie screamed and yelled, ‘There a spider. Mummy, a big black spider.’

‘That child is driving me mad,’ Norah muttered. ‘She won’t give me a minute to myself. But I’ll have to go and see what this one is. I’m still trying to work out which spiders are poisonous and which aren’t.’

When they got back to the humpy, they found Janie standing away from the outdoors table where she’d been sitting peeling potatoes, with a stick in her hand, weeping.

‘It’s there! It’s there!’

There was indeed a furry black spider as big as the palm of the hand on the edge of the table, but even as they watched, it began climbing down and went placidly about its business, walking away in the other direction. It wasn’t trying to attack the child.

‘It’s a huntsman spider,’ Irene said. ‘We had one at our place yesterday. Gil said to leave it alone and it’ll leave you alone. If you get one indoors you can kill it or put it outside.’ She looked at the child. ‘I quite like spiders. They catch mosquitoes for us.’

‘I don’t like them!’ Janie began weeping again. ‘I don’t like it here.’ She was hysterical and wouldn’t listen to her mother, so Norah gave her a shake, then said in a calm voice, ‘You’re being silly. Now calm down this minute.’

So Janie wept more quietly.

‘I don’t know what to do about that child,’ Norah said as the two women went back to work on the garden. ‘She’s naughty nearly all the time and miserable the rest. She tries to come between me and Andrew, and she won’t have anything to do with the boys – or they with her, now.’

‘I suppose it’ll take time for her to get used to you remarrying.’

‘She had the whole of the voyage out here to get used to Andrew and the boys.’

‘But you were still sleeping with her then, so not much had changed.’

Norah sighed. ‘Well, I can’t sleep with her now. I’ve a husband and I want to be with him.’

Irene saw the glow in her friend’s eyes as Norah spoke about her husband and drew her own conclusions. About time too, was her main thought.

She walked slowly back to her block to start cooking Freddie’s tea, wondering what sort of mood he’d be in tonight. Not a good one, that was sure, but some evenings were worse than others.

14

D
uring the next two weeks, the groupies worked hard, bringing order to their own homes as much as they could, getting ready to receive the cows and continuing to clear land so that each family could start with the same amount of usable land. Gil told Andrew privately that since he got so few directives from the Board, he was just doing what seemed fair and practical.

It was cooler now and rained more often, sometimes a downpour so heavy the air they pulled into their lungs seemed almost liquid. The rain also turned the rough tracks to mud, which made it miserable working out of doors or walking into town. Once they stopped working, the men were chilled to the marrow, in spite of the sacks they wore round their shoulders to keep the worst of the rain off. But Gil had to keep them working. Besides, he knew they couldn’t afford to slack off, whatever the weather. Fortunately the rainy spells were only intermittent.

The ‘day or two’ for delivery of the cows stretched into several days and at least they got the cowsheds finished.

Grass was springing up everywhere, ‘winter grass’. In the early spring they’d seed more pastures on the land they’d cleared and he assured them that the grass would grow really quickly once the weather warmed up.

He worked all day with the men and slept at night in his humpy now because a tent was uncomfortable in the rain. Unlike the others, he hadn’t had time to build on a lean-to kitchen, so he paid Pam to cook for him. When he went back from her place, he realised how little he’d done to make his own into a home. He’d do something about that, but later. There was far too much to do for the group at the moment.

But he smiled sometimes because he’d definitely done the right thing coming here, and he knew Mabel would be proud of him. He’d thought of burning her letters and letting her rest in peace, but it seemed wrong to do that. She wrote so well. Maybe sometime in the future people would want to read them to see what life had been like in Australia during the war.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever read them again, didn’t need to now.

As well as fencing Norah’s garden, Andrew built a fowl pen and like most of their group, they sent off for some laying pullets. Everyone bought at least one, while the settlers with more money to spare or large families bought several. If they could produce eggs cheaply, they could feed their families better.

When the Boyds’ four pullets arrived, Janie showed some signs of interest for the first time, making a pet of one which had a twisted foot and couldn’t walk as fast as the others. She made sure that the other chooks, as people called chickens here, didn’t push it out of the way when they were fed and it would follow her around with its slow, lopsided gait.

Andrew watched this without comment. One day he saved that pullet from the others, which had started pecking it and beckoned Janie across. ‘I’ll make you a separate corner for your little friend near the house, but only if you agree to look after her all on your own. Your mother has enough to do. The twisted foot won’t affect the eggs she lays, and as long as she’s producing, we’ll keep her.’ He thrust the wriggling hen into her hands.

When he took time the very next day to make a special enclosure for ‘Fluffy’, Janie’s hostility towards him lessened just a little.

The pullets’ eggs were a godsend, adding variety to the monotonous diet, making cakes and scones a more regular feature, not a rare treat possible only when someone was able to buy a tray of eggs at the store.

What with the chickens and the extra milk from looking after the cow, things weren’t going badly, Norah felt. She didn’t mind the cold or even the wet days, because it wasn’t like snow or ice. Besides, every night, whether they made love or not, she and Andrew would snuggle up together in bed and chat about their day’s doings. She loved that.

Even Janie’s sulks didn’t seem to upset her as much these days. She felt in glowing health and was busy from dawn till dusk.

Andrew was working on a cowshed two farms beyond the central camp ground when two trucks carrying cows drove slowly past, bumping in and out of the ruts, sometimes seeming to pause and decide whether to get out of a particularly deep rut or settle into it, but always just managing to escape and continue.

The men delivering the cows looked tired.

Gil put down his axe and yelled, ‘Stop work!’ Then he strode across the uneven ground towards the trucks, which had pulled up a bit further on. One of the men greeted him by name.

‘Thought you’d vanished from the face of the earth, you old devil!’ the truck driver said affectionately. ‘You look a lot better than last time I saw you.’

Gil nodded. He felt a lot better, too. He exchanged news quickly, congratulated his old friend on the birth of a fourth child and studied the animals.

‘Two for each family we brought this time. It’ll give the groupies time to get used to them before they get their full quota of six.’ He lowered his voice. ‘How’s it going? Lost any of your group yet?’

‘One death, one thief, one runaway wife.’

‘Not bad going. You’ll lose more of them by the end of the winter. Some of the poor sods seem to think it’s going to be sunny all the time here. It might not snow, but I can’t stand mud. I’d rather be working up north where it stays warm all year round, but my wife has family in Bunbury so we’ve settled there.’ He looked back down the track in disgust. ‘Worst road in the area you’ve got.’

‘Yeah. Going to have to corduroy some of the worst patches.’ He’d been keeping some tree trunks to do this with. The men had been amazed to think of laying trunks across the track to form a road surface. But then the poor sods had been amazed at a few things since they got here. You used what you had, and they had felled trees here, not tarmac.

His companion swiped at the water running into his eyes and cursed it cheerfully.

‘Tell me which are the best animals, mate. You must have some idea by now.’

His friend looked sideways at him. ‘Choosing your own?’

‘Nope. Can’t manage any of my own at the moment. I’ll get mine later. It’s just that some of these fellows are less likely to make a go of it, so why waste good beasts on them? Give us a ride, eh?’ He clambered on the outside of the open truck, holding on to the rails and yelled at the men who’d been working with him, ‘Meet you back at the camp ground. We’ll assign the cows then and you can take them home with you.’

When he arrived there, he picked up the metal bar hanging beside the store hut and clanged the iron triangle they used to summon people to meetings or in case of emergencies. He rang it good and loud, knowing that those on the nearer blocks would send children running to warn those on the outer blocks, as agreed. Their version of the ‘bush telegraph’.

While he waited for the groupies to gather, he supervised the brewing of a huge supply of tea in a former kerosene can. You couldn’t beat a hot drink for putting heart into you on a day like this.

He’d have to remind the women to let him know if they had any trouble using the cream separators and other dairy equipment. He’d already demonstrated their use with the milk from the cow Norah was tending.

So many things to do.

He smiled again. Such a nice busy life.

Andrew, who had been working with Gil, stood looking down at the square tin of black tea simmering at the edge of the fire, tendrils of steam curling lazily up from it. He remembered suddenly how people in Pemberton had greeted their train with a similar brew when they first arrived. What a long time ago that seemed now! They’d thought it primitive to brew tea that way, but it tasted just as good as any that’d been brewed in the finest china teapot to a tired, thirsty man.

He shook the rain from the brim of his hat, an Australian style hat which he’d purchased to keep the sun off and now found equally useful for keeping the rain out of his eyes. After taking another gulp of the hot liquid and sighing with pleasure as the warmth slid down him, he went over to study the cows.