Towards Another Summer (8 page)

We played in the ‘good-shed’, chasing each other up and down the sacks of wheat which we called ‘climbers’. It was about then that I became, by dictionary definition, ‘a thievish small bird haunting church towers’ - a jackdaw. My wings were black,
my beak was yellow, my cry was a screech which frightened Isy and Jim as nothing had frightened them before, or perhaps they pretended to be afraid; nevertheless I was happy and powerful, I could live at the top of the climbers, near the roof, and suddenly appearing from behind a big climber, I would flap my wings, thrust forward my yellow beak and fly out to seize Isy and Jim,

—I’m a jackdaw, I’m a jackdaw!

And how proud I felt when we were called for dinner and we trooped in and sat at the table and Isy and Jim, in answer to

—What’ve you been doing this morning? gave the most important item of our play,

—Grace is a jackdaw.

—Yes, Grace is a jackdaw.

I don’t know for how long I remained a jackdaw; perhaps long enough to gain my self-respect which was shattered every time the famous flood was mentioned.

 

 

 

 

How does an only child manage without the social education of brothers and sisters? I lived in what the
Free Lance
or the
Weekly News
would describe as a ‘social whirl’: sister, brother, aunts, uncles, grandmother, grandfather, ordinary neighbours like Mr and Mrs Widdowson, Mr and Mrs Brown; people who worked with my father or provided our groceries or lent us their bull or talked over the fence to my mother, or whose children entered our lives with their invitations, ‘Come on over to our place’ - ‘our place’ being miles away; and beyond the ordinary neighbours the powerful important people who gave orders which could frighten, heal, imprison, dismiss (the ‘sack’): policemen, doctors, mayors, councillors; then, beyond these ‘important people’ the remote persons whose names were printed in the ‘paper’ - the King, the Prince of Wales, Gandhi, Mr Forbes, Mr Coates; murderers, actors, thieves, artists, foreign emperors; and beyond all, God. When the thought of God came to your mind it was so swift that there was no time to examine it.—Who made the
World? your playmate said, and you answered,—God.

His quelling power in response to arguments was tremendous; you won if you could say ‘God said’ or ‘God did’; it was even more useful than the ‘Dad said’, ‘Dad did’ so often used to gain the advantage.

 

If beyond the family there was a ‘social whirl’, nearer home, life was so heavily populated that it almost became a social dizziness: besides relatives - grandparents who lived with us, aunts, uncles, cousins who came for holidays, a mother, a father, two sisters now, one brother - there were spiders in the corners of the floor and roof, slaters and slugs under stones, worms in the garden, ladybirds on leaves, snails in the bushes, birds in the trees, rats and mice in the scullery, trout in the river, cattle and sheep in the paddocks, and our new cow Beauty, smaller, less wild and tossing than Betty who, my mother explained, was ‘an Ayreshire, not as trustworthy and gentle as a Jersey’. It was my job now to feed Beauty with potatoes while she was being milked. She stood pinned in the bail slowly chewing her cud or slicing and crunching the black-eyed potatoes. Sometimes when a potato dropped from the heap away from her she would stretch her neck forward, open her mouth, blowing out her grassy breath, and roll out her long signal-red tongue like a passage carpet even to the curled tip that will not uncurl and lie flat. Then having regained the straying potato Beauty would begin munching it, drawing her head back towards the bail, with the golden and black skin of her neck which had so obligingly allowed her to stretch for the lost potato, settling to its habitual saggy folds; then Beauty would close her eyes dreaming, swish her tail, while spitter-spatter went the milk into the bucket until the bucket was full, and the white foam overflowed.

When I stopped being a jackdaw I withdrew for a time from the ‘social whirl’ and became a solitary ‘beastie’ in the paddock. I even wore a ‘beastie’ dress of gold velvet, and although I had often been afraid of the beasties in their coats of gold velvet I was no longer afraid when I had my own beastie dress. All day I explored and played in the paddock; alone with the beasties; until something happened to frighten my mother and father who looked at each other and said, talking of me,—She’s been playing near the swamp. Oh, the swamp! Red weed grew on it, the same colour as the inside of the red rubber ball which an aunt had given to us ‘brand-new’ and which we had torn to pieces because our curiosity about its inside had grown so intense we could bear it no longer, we
had
to know what it was made of and where its bounce came from. Our aunt had been so angry when she returned for a visit and saw the bounceless red rubber wreck lying neglected on the garden path.

But if we hadn’t destroyed the red rubber ball how should we have known that the swamp in the next paddock had weed identical with the inside of the ball?

It seemed that, like the ‘magazine’, the swamp was a forbidden place. There were so many places and things forbidden and to be feared - the flood, the war, the magazine, the swamp, bulls, rats in the wall, drunk men, swaggers, the strap, uncles and aunts who threatened, ‘We’ll put you in a sack and throw you in the sea.’ ‘The gypsies will steal you.’ Also, there were our own little knotted handkerchiefs which held our treasured collection of childhood beliefs and superstitions - mixtures of truth and fantasy, of words misheard or misunderstood, of half-solved perplexities, of desperate questions given desperate answers rather than be left with no answer at all . . . my eye was hurt . . . the doctor made it better, the doctor and the pixies whom I called the ‘pitties’. Who were the ‘pitties’? Why did my mother smile when I talked of them? Why did she keep asking me, as if she didn’t know,—Who made your eye better? and when I answered, preferring the stranger explanation,—The ‘pitties’, why did she look so pleased and sly?

I could not speak properly; words were confused. One of my
favourite toys was a kerosene tin with a piece of rope tied to it, which I pulled along the lawn under the walnut tree and over to the fence for the beasties to share my pleasure in it. There was a song which I sang about my tin, but why did everyone laugh when I sang it?

Words were so mysterious, full of pleasure and fear. Mosgiel. Mosgiel. Up Central. Taieri. Waihola. Ao-Tea-Roa. Lottie. Lottie. That was my mother’s name, yet we never called her Lottie, it was only aunts and uncles who were allowed to use her name.

My aunt, who had her goitre out (goitre, goitre), stood at the door, in the passage, and called,

—Oh Lottie, one moment, Lottie.

Or she said to my father,

—What does Lottie think? Does Lottie like living in Outram?

Sometimes when visitors came the word would come strangely from my father’s lips and with a feeling of shock I would try to believe that he had said it.

—As I was saying to Lottie only this afternoon . . .

The word was strange and frightening; it gave my mother a new distinction which seemed to separate her from us, which implied that she did not belong to us at all. It made me curious about her and jealous of her; her name was a way of saying
No
to us - but weren’t we her babies, hadn’t I been her special baby until Dorry was born? And when the next one was born wouldn’t it be her special baby too? A terrible panic overwhelmed me when I heard her name; I saw her moving farther and farther away; I knew it was true, she didn’t belong to us at all and we didn’t belong to her, and I was myself, only myself and nobody else.

Sometimes I repeated her name softly. Lottie. Once I called her name aloud and she became angry and my father said, —Don’t be rude to your mother. Lottie and George. Lottie-and-George.
They were my mother and father. No one but us called them Mum and Dad.

I played by myself, near the fence, while the beastie stood looking at me. As beasties do, it was weeping, a tear running down the thin dark track upon its cheek. I spoke to it.

—Lottie, I said.—How you do you like living in Outram?

Then very boldly I called out,—Lottie-and-George, Lottie-and-George!

 

 

 

 

—I’ve had a shift, my father said.—We’re going to live in Glenham. People ‘on the railway’ were always ‘shifting’, and when my mother talked to the neighbours somewhere in the conversation there would be reference to ‘being on the railway’ and ‘shifting’. Yet I think my mother was pleased when we were settled in Glenham for it was not as close as Outram had been to the Main Trunk Line, and my father did not have the responsibility of being on the expresses. He had not long been promoted from Fireman to Engine-driver and here, out in the country, there was little danger of his driving head-on into another train or running over some of the thousands and thousands of people who lived near Dunedin. My mother calmed her fears and sang to us at night when my father had gone to work (carrying his handmade leather work-bag, his engine-driver cap, his blueys, his salmon sandwiches)

So it was all right. We were not afraid. And if my father were driving the engine near our house he always blew the whistle to let us know that all was well.

I slept in the cot now; it was still my size. Dorry, the baby, was getting bigger and would soon be ready to leave her petrol-box and join my sister and brother and me in our new world of
Glenham and the Glenham railway, among the old twisted rusty lines, the piled sleepers, the disused turntable . . .

Soon it would be time for the stork to bring another baby, but it was not quite time, for Dorry still fed at my mother’s titties and slept between my mother and father in the ‘big bed’. Perhaps on our next shift, my mother said, there might be a new baby, but I was not interested, for Dorry belonged to me, my mother had told me so, and it wasn’t likely that I could have two, so soon; there were my sister and brother to think of, and dividing had to be strictly fair.

 

Sooner than my father expected he was given another transfer - to Edendale, not far from Glenham. The surprising and exciting novelty about this ‘shift’ was that our house was to accompany us; it was to be dismantled, carried to Edendale, and rebuilt, and while we were waiting we were to live in railway huts in Glenham.

It was winter, and it snowed, and because Glenham was inland the snow stayed and became deeper and deeper. Our huts were set in the snow. One hut belonged to my mother and father and the baby, one hut was our bedroom, another a kitchen, sitting room, another a wash-house.

My father dug a dumpy about fifty yards from the huts and built a tin shed to cover it. We lived here for six months. We had colds that did not get better, we were ‘steamed’ with Friar’s Balsam, my legs ached and I cried and cried, and the aunt from Dunedin visited and said Lottie how can you put up with it, and the world was full of beetles, beetles crawling up the wall and along the ceiling and the floor and I said Look at the beetles and my mother said Where, and I pointed to them, and the aunt from Dunedin said,

—She’s delirious.

It snowed and snowed. There were rats whispering in the wall; there were strange shadows creeping up and down the wall; if we were afraid in the night or had toothache we could not get to our mother and father, for it was dark outside and the snow was too deep. The baby had a funny little cough like
a sheep’s cough and her face was red and shiny; my mother’s arms and hands were red with washing clothes and nappies. Sometimes my mother would talk wistfully to my father or to us of the time in Outram when she had her ‘arm up’ for six weeks and ‘your father did the washing and milked the cow’. I couldn’t remember about my mother’s hurting her arm and having it bandaged, but I sensed that it was an important occasion in her life, almost as important as the flood, and rivalled only by the now legendary time that my father had his ‘ankle in plaster’ following an accident at football in Dunedin.

—When I was off with my ankle, my father used to say.

I was always disappointed to learn that my father’s ankle had been hurt at football; it seemed unworthy. And I was always sad when my mother talked of her arm, she talked so wistfully, as if it had been a time of great freedom that she would never again experience - yet how was it freedom if her arm had been in a sling?

—When you were little, and I had my arm up for six weeks . . .

 

 

 

 

Our house was built and we had scarcely time to get used to it when another ‘shift’ came: to Wyndham, the largest town we had lived in - with one Main Street and a few other streets, with ‘over the fence’ neighbours; a school, a river; and people, people everywhere. It was an exciting day when we moved (not forgetting to take Beauty with us) into the house beside the railway line in Ferry Street. There were houses all the way along the road to the river at one end and the main street at the other. From a world of snowgrass, snowberries, manuka, cattle, sheep, birds, with only sky and rabbits and paddocks for miles and miles, to streets with houses and people; people to know, to stare at, to poke faces at, to call names after, to be afraid of, to run from.

I was four. We explored under the house and found it
‘good’. An open cow-bail was made for Beauty in the corner of the garden near the railway line. Down the end of the garden there was a pump for our water. Over the fence near the pump was another railway house where the Hadfords lived - Mr, Mrs, Mavis, Joan, Ronnie. Now that we were surrounded by people my mother seemed to lose her wistfulness; she became a busy neighbour accepting and giving hot scones, pikelets, jams; exchanging views; and, inside our home, expressing her opinion of the neighbours - the Hadfords, the Lyles, the Bakers. Although she talked to our father and not to us, we listened and learned. To our pride we learned that we had ‘strong little chests’ whereas Mavis Hadford was definitely consumptive and Ronnie was like a stick and the Baker children were like sticks and what they all needed was plenty of milk and cream. Their frailty, my mother said, came from their living ‘in the town’. If living in Wyndham was living in ‘the town’ then we children liked it, and however longingly and proudly my mother soon began to talk of ‘when we lived in the huts, six months in winter, in snow, when Dorry was a baby’ we wouldn’t have exchanged Wyndham for Glenham or Edendale or Outram. We played with the Hadfords and the Bakers. We played neighbours and visiting and school and I was the teacher and my mother looked from the kitchen door and I heard her saying to Mrs Lyles who had come to borrow some flour,—She’ll be a schoolteacher when she grows up!