Down a Country Lane. Gary Blinco
for as long as he was able to do manual work. This act seemed very generous to some that heard the story, but fifteen acres was nothing to people who had tens of thousands of acres. Norm could never verify the tale of the shepherd, but as it accounted for the unusually small size of the farm he took it to be true. Besides, he liked the story – it gave a sense of history and triumph over adversity.
The farm and the surrounding properties were covered in scrub, except for about ten acres of cultivation around the old farmhouse itself. This made the place look like an oasis set in a desert of thick brigalow scrub that was interspersed with tall gums and stunted wattle trees. The scrub abounded with plenty of native and introduced animals. Kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, goannas, hundreds of species of birds and parrots and an assortment of snakes. Gaunt wild looking cattle and sheep shared the bush with the natives, the farmed beasts almost as feral in appearance and disposition as were those other foreigners, the foxes and hares.
Norm Blinco felt happy. He had passed this small farm so many times over the years as he laboured about the area, always dreaming of one day owning the place. Now with the dream in his grasp he knew he was going to like living at the farm. The children were lucky too he thought, being too young to have any past or to remember the war. Their lives were as clean slates waiting to be written, and he saw this little farm as the perfect place for them to build some memories and prepare them for the world. Norm had a sweet vision of the years ahead as they stretched out before them, and for now he could brook no ill wind.
CHAPTER TWO
O gentle land, I sow
The heart’s living grain.
Stars draw their harrows over,
Dews send their melting rain:
I meet you as a lover.
David Campbell, ‘Night sowing’
Several weeks had passed and the farm was beginning to look inhabited with a curl of smoke rising from the chimney and washing dancing in the breeze on the clothesline. The first flush of dreams come true gave way to hard backbreaking work and they had all settled into a routine of long days of toil. The results filled Norm with hope as he stood in the garden under a clear blue sky with the warm sun on his back, the quiet sounds of the bush in his ears and the smell of freshly tilled soil sweet in his nostrils. He leaned lazily on the handle of his hoe surveying his handiwork to date. With the overgrown grass methodically cleared and the fruit trees trimmed, the place looked quite presentable, he reasoned contentedly. He had almost completed hoeing a broad patch of the front garden, getting it ready for planting. It now lay smooth and clear, the dark earth moist and waiting for the first crop.
Grace developed a routine around simply making the old house liveable. She loved the feeling of ownership and purpose that engulfed her as she worked, quickly taking stock of the place and setting up the rooms for the children and allocating sleeping spaces. The house was basic to say the least, but to her it was a mansion and it was her own, at least in title. A large room at one end served as a kitchen, living room and dining room combination. The room had a single window with quarter panes of frosted glass on one side, and a low cupboard with a single rusty old sink on the other. A tall pantry cupboard with a hutch for crockery stood in a corner near the sink.
A wood stove with an oven sat in a tin-covered recess that grew off the rear of the room and protruded like a wart on the side of the house. The stove was old and rusty in parts, but Grace scrubbed and cleaned until it shone and worked like new. She beamed with pride as she prepared their meals in the now clean and functional kitchen. She closed her mind and her eyes to the bare floorboards with gaping cracks that showed the bare earth below, and the knotholes in the weatherboards that let little beams of light through the walls. The house faced the creek and entry was via a front verandah that had a half wall on two sides, a wide rail on top of the half wall doubled as a seat. The children often perched on the wall like fowls, staring out at the night sky in dreamy silence as Norm played gently on his mouth organ. The simple instrument provided their only entertainment and few nights passed without him being urged to play for a while.
A crude wooden door led from the verandah to the living area. None of the external doors could be locked, but security did not seem important out here in the bush. Besides, Norm insisted that locks would only keep out honest people anyway. The verandah became the ‘boy’s room’, despite being partly open to the elements. Boys were deemed to be more resilient than girls are and therefore able to endure the harsh conditions imposed by the elements, animals and insects.
Grace took the larger of the two inside bedrooms as the master because it offered at least some privacy, which was important to a couple that wanted to produce a large number of children. A smaller room, really an enclosed end of the verandah, formed an alcove off their bedroom, and this was nominated as ‘the girl’s room’. As she made up the two small bunks in the room a quick clutch of sadness gripped her heart when she thought of her lost daughter. But she soon brightened, remembering the one who remained, and there would be more to come.
At the rear of the house a small back verandah had been enclosed to form a crude bathroom. The room contained an old iron bathtub and a stand with a round enamel washbasin. A small cabinet attached to the wall she called ‘the medicine cabinet’, and it contained all sorts of bottles, pills and potions collected over the years. Most of them were probably now useless, the passage of time rendering the drugs ineffective. But the collection gave her comfort and some sense of protection from the injuries and illness she expected to visit them in the bush.
The bathtub did not last long. It was old and worn thin with use and during the first romping bath one of the children put a foot through the base of it, splitting the tub and wounding the offending foot. Norm immediately commissioned the old tub as a seed raising bed where he planned to nurture the young vegetable seedlings before transplanting them to the main garden. The children would have to take their rare baths in an old round iron tub that he had found in the shed.
They were forced to compete for the use of the tub and Grace became angry the first time she required it, only to find Norm had used it for storing live fish. He had caught several catfish and a large golden perch from the creek, and storing them in water in the old tub was the only means of keeping them fresh. They had no form of refrigeration. Kid’s irregular baths took second place to this other more important function.
Grace had very few furnishings, but she made do with a couple of old beds that had made the trip to the farm in the old wagon. There were also some bunks and basic furniture items already at the farm. However, her children mostly slept at least two to a bed to get the most out of the limited sleeping space. This did not appear to bother them; perhaps the company in bed was reassuring on those first nights in the unfamiliar old house. The mixture of mysterious nocturnal sounds in the bush often filled the children with alarm. Some nights they would not settle into sleep but lay awake in their beds as they listened fearfully to the haunting call of the mopoke, the lowing of the cattle in the scrub paddock next door, and the constant croaking and quacking of the frogs and wild-ducks along the creek.
Sometimes during those first few nights Grace chilled to the sharp scream-like call of a fox. The sound always sent shivers up her spine, the mournful cry somehow adding to the loneliness of the bush night. The children huddled snugly in their beds, comforting one another and loudly guessing what animal made the sounds, and where they may be hiding on the farm. In the light of the new day they searched for traces of the animals they had heard the night before, but usually they found nothing.
Possums crept among the rafters of the roof and scared them out of their wits with their queer hissing cries, and kangaroos thumped about in the garden like grey ghosts in the moonlight. After a few days, once the children knew what they were, the possums became friendly and were hand fed on crusts of bread. Through it all Norm usually snored contentedly, dog tired from his toil on the farm. Within a few days, with Norm’s patient guidance, they all lost their fear of the night bush as they came to recognise the various sounds. Then the noises became a sweet lullaby that soothed them to sleep each night.
Grace had few of the basic home amenities