In Tasmania (33 page)

‘What kind of stuff?'

‘That much bloody glass,' he laughed. Alcohol, but also little perfume bottles and bottles for gut ache. ‘You can have some if you like.'

He led me into a shed built with rocks salvaged from Hordern's old water tank. When he took over the property, his plan was to leave the stone base as a memorial. ‘But when I removed the tank the whole thing crashed down.'

Shelves inside the shed were stacked with bottles of different shapes, colours and sizes that he had rescued from beneath Stoke Rivers. Iodine; chicory essence from Edinburgh; chlorodine.

I chose a small green perfume bottle and another of clear, thick glass that had contained some kind of medicine. I would give the bottles to my mother.

Before I left I asked if any fruit trees remained on the property.

He shook his head. ‘I cut the last two plum trees down. One was hollow in the middle. I lit a match and he burned right down to ground level, that's how dry he was. I reckon the ants been through him.'

He promised not to cut down the laurel.

SOMEONE HAD LEFT A ROW OF SILENT MESSAGES ON THE ANSWER-
machine. I traced them to Ivy, who said that she had something of Hordern's that she wanted to give me, although this was not the only reason for her call. In less than a fortnight she and Maud were selling their farm and moving to a bungalow in Ulverstone that they had set their hearts on.

‘You don't do the same thing all your life. You got to do something different.'

I went to stay with them on the eve of their departure. The distance between Boode House and their new home was less than nine miles, but for ‘the girls', as a local woman referred to them, it was a journey as distant as if they were setting sail to Australia two centuries before.

The silver-framed Lady Diana was still in pride of place beside the hallway telephone, protected by a posse of stern-looking dolls. Ivy said, seeing my face: ‘And there are some dolls where you're going to sleep, whether you like it or not.'

In the kitchen, the walls were stripped of ancient photographs and ceramic plates. The sisters' belongings were packed in cardboard boxes, awaiting the arrival of various cousins to transport them by car to Ulverstone. They had sold the farm to their nephew Bill, the son of Teddy who had shown me Stoke Rivers.

Ivy was trapped between her wish to leave Bill a good garden and her determination to transplant every leaf in it. She and her sister had potted hundreds of daffodils and dug up seven cases of potatoes. Outside the kitchen, all ready to go, were tubs of soil spaded from the farm and originally ordered by their mother. From one tub I picked out a woman's stocking stuffed with Maud's tulip bulbs. A label tied at the neck read: ‘White Dreams'.

It had taken three nights to burn the rubbish of a lifetime. ‘I stayed one night until 10 p.m. then carted six buckets of water to put the fire out,' Ivy said. She had poured on a further 14 buckets the following evening. And watching the smoke rise from the damp ashes it had dawned on her: the date they had fixed to leave Boode House – February 13 – was their grandfather Hordern's birthday.

The business of packing-up had made the sisters nostalgic, Ivy especially. ‘A lot of things you don't realise, do you, what your parents do for you when you grow up?'

In the kitchen Maud was busy preparing tea. On blue Wedgwood plates she had laid out buttered fingers of malt bread, and covered them against the flies with cream-coloured tin cups.

‘What regrets do you have?' I asked Ivy.

‘I suppose there are silly things in your life you wish hadn't happened. But I don't know if I'd have done any differently. It just sort of happens, your life. They reckon it's mapped out when you're born. People can be in a car in an accident and some are killed and some don't even get a scratch on them.'

‘Have you treated anyone badly?' I suppose I was thinking of Kemp.

‘Don't think I have.'

‘So you've led a blameless life?'

‘Looks like it, doesn't it?'

Maud snorted. ‘I get told off.'

‘I tell you off, yes, because you do silly things you shouldn't, like you thought I'd gone into the garden but I was sitting in there reading one of those rubbish things in the mail.'

‘I didn't say a thing!'

‘You were talking to yourself. You said “bloody”.'

‘I didn't say –'

‘Yes, you did, I heard you. I tell you straight to your face what I think of you.'

Both were sobbing with laughter.

Ivy turned to me. ‘Tell me the truth. No two people can live together they don't have words,' and rubbing her eyes she went outside to get me some potatoes that she had promised.

She dragged back in a large paper sack brimming with Pontiacs and Red Rascals. Next, she insisted on cutting for my wife a bunch of dahlias, pink lilies and carnations that she wrapped in damp newspaper. Then she gave me a bundle tied in a cloth. ‘I packed up some silver last night for you, but I don't want you telling anyone.'

The bundle consisted of two of her grandfather's prize cards for breeding; his brass inkwell; and half a dozen silver knives and forks stamped with his initials and those of his wife.

Before I went to bed, I telephoned Gillian. There was no answer ‘Perhaps she's walked out on you,' Ivy said. ‘That's what they do nowadays.'

 

I slept very well in their mother's bed under the strict ministry of their dolls. And in the morning found them sitting in a dark kitchen, curtains drawn, Maud eating in silence – her dried chicken covered in bacon – while Ivy, sitting by a solitary sunbeam, read a small pocket diary in which she had recorded the most important moments of her life.

She handed it over without hesitation, the shiny black notebook from her grandfather's trunk into which she had entered her 78 years on earth with the born archivist's lack of embellishment.

Near the end of the diary were two notes on their own, without dates: ‘During 20 years Stuart Mais (Mum's cousin) made nearly $70,000 out of literature.'

And: ‘G. went through £40,000'.

‘Who's G.?' I asked.

‘Grandpa.'

 

Boode House had been built following a week of Hordern weddings. Brodie married Chic Purton's cousin on June 22, 1921. Seven days earlier, Brodie's sister Mary had married Harry Rose, a farm labourer and accordion player, who had courted her in the post office with polka tunes. They erected the weatherboard bungalow as King's trial was going on in Hobart.

Maud, the first of their daughters, was born the following year; Gwen in 1924, and two years later Ivy and her twin Heather.

‘No boys, so we had to be boys, didn't we, Maudy?'

Ivy's first bed was an open drawer, her first vehicle a horse and cart. She thought nothing of walking five miles a day. In the morning she walked 45 minutes to the primary school next to the cemetery and in the afternoon walked back up the hill. On Sunday, she squeezed with her sisters into the family pew in North Motton church.

‘Do you still believe in God?'

‘Yes. But don't think going to church makes you Christian. They use that for cover. It's how you live your life. It's how you treat other people. As far as we know, Maudy, we haven't caused anyone any harm, have we? We've tried to behave ourselves, lead good lives.'

They had left school at 14 to help on the farm. In due course their sisters married, and Ivy and Maud made each a four-tiered wedding-cake. After Gwen's marriage, they stood in the front garden and watched Teddy wheel her belongings down the hill to his house. Then they went back indoors.

‘Did you always know you'd be farmers?' I asked.

‘No, you don't do you?' Ivy said. ‘Our parents might have liked us to get out, but they never said. Not like the birds – kick 'em out, don't they?' She had experienced only one flicker, one moment when she pictured an alternative life. ‘In a penny concert, I was dressed up as a nurse. But that was make-believe stuff.'

The 48-acre farm consumed both sisters' energies. Their mother taught them how to make ‘eggie' cakes and to sew their own clothes; their father how to set traps for rabbits, cut fences from palings and to operate the thresher and stone-crusher. ‘Whatever the season brought, we were mixed up in.' They continued where their grandfather Hordern left off: growing crops and flowers; breeding cattle; selling eggs, butter and cream that they trundled to the road where a truck collected it.

The crops were mostly potatoes, but they also grew oats, hay and peas, tearing outside in thunderstorms to cover the young pods with the tarpaulins that they would later thrash them on. Like Hordern, they operated a barter system with G. & A. Ellis in Ulverstone. ‘They had three stores under one roof – grocery, drapery, hardware,' Ivy said. ‘A man came on Monday to take orders for delivery on Wednesdays. Never much money changed hands. They'd take all we had.'

Ivy had kept the receipts. In June 1937, for instance, was delivered one coil of cyclone wire (value £1 four shillings and ninepence), 25 sacks (value nineteen shillings and ninepence) and various groceries (five shillings and sevenpence). In return, the Ellis brothers took away potatoes worth £4 four shillings and fourpence, plus seven bags of onions and 15 and a half dozen eggs worth £2 eleven shillings.

In this way they had bought a battery-powered radio set in September 1939 to listen to Neville Chamberlain. Later, they congregated beside a kerosene lamp to hear the names of the fallen reeled off, among them three schoolfriends from North Motton primary. It was a time of ration tickets for meat and extravagant rumour. Up the road, Bebe Close's husband had told her that if the Japanese arrived she was to go with the children to the wharf and jump off.

The Second World War also brought electricity. Until then they had had to read in bed with candles, and soap their cardigans by hand. ‘We had no washing machine – we used scrubbing boards.' Once electricity was installed in 1943, they bought an electric iron, pinning neat pressed blackouts over the windows and obscuring the headlights of their father's fawn Chevy with black strips. ‘We still use that iron,' Ivy said. ‘And we've had two washing machines in our lives. Not like the next generation that gets a steam iron and forgets to pour water in it and it blows up.'

In the late 1970s, Ellis's refused any longer to pick up the cream and the sisters switched over to breeding. They bought in day-old Jerseys and Herefords, hand-fed them milk from buckets and sold them as yearlings, about 25 in any one year.

Flowers were another source of income. ‘We couldn't have afforded what we did without cut flowers,' Ivy said. Auntie Ethel, who was known to walk miles for one rose, had started her off. From the age of 16, Ivy sold cut carnations, chrysanthemums, violets, polyanthus, iris, phlox, lily of the valley, dahlias, daffodils, tulips and peony roses. Mrs Pearce's van came nearly every day for funerals. ‘I'd be in the cowshed and Maudy would come over with the secateurs and we'd go and fill her car with flowers. I reckoned we earned $26,000 in 60 years.'

It is difficult to be wise and serene in midst of the things. But it seemed to me that these sisters had achieved serenity by narrowing everything in; by not going beyond the front gate; by removal. The only picture left on the kitchen wall – a coloured print, titled
Wishing-Well Lane
– was of a thatched cottage with a flower garden.

‘I said to Maud we could do our house in Ulverstone like that.'

Maud laughed.

‘We could!' Ivy insisted. Then noticing my cup she said sternly: ‘You haven't had yours, have you?'

THERE WERE A COUPLE OF ENTRIES IN IVY'S DIARY THAT I DID NOT
understand.

Ivy reread her young girl's flowery handwriting. ‘W. Delaney arrested, August 7, 1938.' She looked at her sister. ‘That was sad, wasn't it?'

She was twelve when a family quarrel stopped her attending North Motton church. The diary suggested that it was one of two defining events in her life.

On August 7, 1938, their father's first cousin and neighbour, Bill Delaney, was caught stealing eggs and wheat from their shed. (‘Mum got all the bad news in the cowshed – where she read the mail.') Already Delaney was suspected of taking timber and scratching a few of their potatoes out of the ground. This time they surprised him red-handed, Gwen and their mother having hidden in the bathroom with the local policeman.

‘Just getting a bit of wheat, sir, to feed my chicks,' Delaney said.

Ivy's father agreed not to press charges so long as Delaney returned the timber.

‘He couldn't help himself,' Ivy said. ‘He was a kleptomaniac. After that, the kids would tease him if he had a basket. They'd say “Any eggs in it?” He was that thick in the hide, he'd just take it. He had four girls and they were the same. One was had up for thieving in a store. Another stole clothes off a dog. Off a dog!'

They had stopped attending North Motton church because of Delaney's wife. ‘You wouldn't be enjoying yourself much, the things she came up with. She'd do it to your face, no matter where you were. She'd ruin everything you went out to do with the horrible things she'd say.'

Instead, they worshipped at the church in Gunn's Plains, but the fear of meeting Delaney or his wife made them reluctant to leave their property.

‘It stopped us going out because she'd say something,' Maud said.

‘Dishonesty! I can't stand dishonesty. Or meanness!' It was the first time that I had heard Ivy raise her voice.

 

The second incident was reported in a newspaper cutting that Ivy had glued to the front flap of her diary.

In the early hours of April 23, 1946, their 18-year-old cousin and former classmate Margaret Viney died after a strange head-on collision between two motorbikes. The cutting described Margaret as ‘an active worker for patriotic organisations and church'. But elsewhere her affections were the object of fierce competition.

At 2 a.m. she was riding on the pillion behind William and Kenneth Lee on a level stretch of the Gawler Road. Driving on another motorbike in the same direction were two more rivals for her love, Clement Dolbey and Thomas Cassidy. The two motorbikes accelerated past Lovett Street and then one of the drivers decided to overtake.

Shortly afterwards, Mr and Mrs Horace Whiley were awakened by the sound of the machines which they heard stop suddenly. Going outside to investigate, they found five young bodies scattered on the road. ‘A mysterious feature is that although both motor cycles are believed to have been travelling towards Gawler damage to the machines indicates that they met head on.'

Viney and Dolbey died a few hours later, the victims of a game of Tasmanian ‘chicken' that had gone terribly wrong.

‘Too many blokes wanted the same one,' Ivy said. ‘There were plenty of others about and then none has it.'