Mother of Ten (8 page)

 “She’s
here, Dad,” called Maxie, relief evident in his voice. The others joined in so
that a chorus of voices announced my arrival.

The
truck moved forward once more. I was still sullen and defiant but I felt that I
had at least made a stand. Of course, it was like water off a duck’s back to my
parents who were by now quite experienced in the ways of children. They knew
exactly how to handle me. As far as they were concerned it was just another one
of my sulks.

However,
perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps in my childhood innocence some intuition
told me that the move from the Bonang cottage did, in fact, mark the end of the
happiest years in the life of our family.

Sixty-nine-year
old Olive welcomed us into her three bedroom weatherboard home in Salisbury
Street with open arms.  She didn’t seem to mind that there were now six
children and three adults in the house she and Pop had quietly enjoyed for
years. The house trembled under the onslaught of running feet and reverberated
with the sounds of children laughing, shouting and crying. That the house was
on a big double block was a blessing because it meant, as my mother put it,
‘the kids had room to run wild’.

Rose
bushes graced the front yard of Nan’s place. In one corner stood a loquat tree
whose dense canopy and abundant succulent yellow fruit attested to its age and
fertility. A cement path led visitors from the gate to the front door via large
semi-circular stone steps, caressed on both sides by the pink and blue blooms
of rotund hydrangea bushes. These bushes were perfect places for us kids to
hide whenever we ‘ran away from home’. The front veranda was where Nan and Pop
had often sat together on warm evenings to watch ‘the passing parade’ and wave at
old Bernie Johnson across the road pottering around in his vegetable garden.

My
brothers quickly discovered that it was possible to run from one end of Nan’s
house to the other along the wide hallway. They delighted in the opportunity to
charge through the back door, straight along the hall, out through the front
door using the hall rug as a slide for the last section, then around the side
path to appear at the back door again for a repeat performance, always
competing to see who could do it in the fastest time. On one occasion, the
neighbour’s pony, either inspired by the boys or frightened by something,
actually galloped through the back door and along the hall out to the front
veranda.

The
back part of the house consisted of a wash house, with a copper heated on wash
days by a wood fire beneath it. The outside back door separated this laundry
section from the kitchen; the hub of the house from which tantalizing aromas
beckoned us and where freshly baked scones, cakes and pies often covered the
table.

 Like
her mahogany dining table, Nan’s wood cupboard was a source of enchantment for
us. It was next to the stove in the kitchen and could be accessed from inside
as well as outside. We could enter the cupboard through the door on the kitchen
side, clamber over the pile of wood then depart, like elves, through the small
door which was used for placing the wood into the cupboard from the outside.
The seductive charm of Nan’s house and Nan herself eventually stopped me
brooding over the loss of our Bonang home even though I missed the bush: its
earthy smell, the silence of isolation, the wide open spaces and especially the
songs of the birds.

Dad
rose early on the first morning in our new home to take the truck out to the
bush to collect a load of firewood. Instead of the heavy work of cutting
sleepers he had become a ‘wood merchant’ or so it said on the driver’s side
door of our old green Commer truck.  He planned to keep a stack of sawn
logs in the back yard ready for delivery. The boys were going with him, eagerly
dragging themselves from their beds despite their hard work of the day before.

Mum
and Nan were in the kitchen early, stoking the fire in the wood stove and
getting the kettle on the boil.

“You
look after the little ones, Myrtle,” Nan said with a smile, “And I’ll look
after the grown-ups.”

Mum
prepared five bowls of Weet-bix; one for each of my brothers and one for me.
Irene was still asleep in her cot and would be fed later.

“We
don’t have any red coals for toasting bread, I’m afraid,” Nan said when my
father entered the kitchen. “I’ve not long lit the fire.”

“Never
mind,” said Dad. He strode to the bench and began slicing a loaf of bread with
the large carving knife. “Just cook it on the top of the stove. That’ll do me.”

He
handed two thick slices of the white bread to Nan who placed them on the
blackened cast iron hot plate of the stove. On another hot plate, a frypan
sizzled with lamb chops, sausages and eggs.  Nan shuffled the food around
in the frypan with an egg lifter and, with the fingers of her free hand, she
turned the bread over from time to time.

“Stop
that, you two.” Bobby attempted an air of authority in his tone as he chastised
the twins who were fighting over the jug of milk. This was the milk from Nan’s
pet cow.

“Mum,
the babies are slopping milk all over Nan’s table,” he added.

Dad
sat down at the head of the table. Mum placed a cup of tea in front of him. A
plate of fried food that Nan had transferred from the pan followed.

Georgie
released his grasp on the milk jug and turned to glare at Bobby.

“We’re
not babies,” he said firmly. “We’re big now. We’re seven.”

Nan
placed Dad’s two slices of toast on his plate. Kevin had also lost interest in
the milk jug and joined his twin in his protest.

“Mu...um.
Tell Bobby to stop calling us babies.”

“Yeah,”
said Georgie. “Tell him, Mum. Irene’s the baby.”

The
twins had been called ‘the babies’ since the day they were born. Bobby, now
aware of his father’s presence, refrained from arguing further but hissed at
them under his breath. “Babies!”

Mum
was mindful of Nan, afraid the noise would irritate her.

“That’ll
be enough from you lot,” she said. 

She
looked across at Dad. His head was bent over the plate as he used his teeth to expertly
skin the last of the cooked meat from a chop bone.

“Dad,”
she said.

He
raised his eyes to look at her and nodded. They always seemed to understand
each other’s glances. He placed the bone back on his plate and picked up the
second piece of toast.

“Right,
you boys,” he said, “Off you go and wait in the truck.”

Immediately,
their argument was forgotten. All four of them pushed their chairs back from
the table and headed for the door, each jostling to be first to race out to the
back yard and climb into the truck. Dad laughed as he watched them disappear.
He finished his toast, gulped down the last of his tea and stood up. Mum handed
him a thermos of tea and the lunch box she had prepared earlier containing
sandwiches and apples.

“Wait
a minute, Myrtle,” said Nan reaching for a large cake tin in the cupboard. “Pop
these scones in. I made them yesterday.”

She
wrapped half a dozen brown topped scones in a clean tea towel and handed them
to Mum.

“Thanks,
Mum.” My mother placed the scones into the box before releasing it to Dad’s
grasp.

“Well,
I’m off for another day of hard yakka,” said my father with a grin.

He
tucked the box under his arm and hurried out the door. I heard the truck engine
spluttering into life. Then the rumbling of the truck along the back driveway
announced the departure of my father and brothers. The house seemed strangely
quiet.

“What
about you, Myrtle?” asked Nan, frypan in one hand and egglifter in the other.
“What will you have for breakfast?”

My
mother laughed. “You sit down and have your own breakfast, Mum. I can look
after myself.”

“Not
on your first day in your new home,” said Nan as she placed the frypan back on
top of the stove. “You sit down and I’ll cook you something.”

Mum
laughed and sat down.

“Careful,”
she said to Nan, “I could get used to this.”

Nan
smiled and picked up two pink sausages from the pile on a tray on the bench.

“Sausages?”
she said displaying the conjoined casings of ground meat.

“Thanks,
Mum. One will do. I usually just have tea and toast with Vegemite.”

Because
it was expensive, my mother always gave first priority for meat to Dad and us.
The accepted wisdom of the time was that men needed meat because of the hard
work they did and children needed it because they were growing.

At
breakfast time it was usually only Dad who had meat. The rest of us had just
the one cooked meal on most days although Mum would often include cold meat or
leftovers in the sandwiches she made for our lunch.

“Well,
today you’re having an egg as well,” said Nan. “It’ll do us both good: sausages
and eggs.”

So
that was how Nan welcomed Mum to her new home. My mother’s years of living in
the bush were over but not her years of living with ghosts.

Sleeping
quarters in our new house were only slightly less cramped than in the Bonang
house. I shared my grandmother’s bedroom although I did not think of it as a
room I shared. It was my grandmother’s room and I laid no claim to it in any
way other than the place where I slept.  My four brothers slept in the
small room across the hall from the front parlour which was now a bedroom for
my parents and Irene, whose cot nestled in a corner.

At
first, the boys seemed to be constantly running through the house. Scolding
them barely diminished their enthusiasm for this activity. In the end, Mum gave
them permission to play in the vacant lot next door. They grasped this new
adventure with gusto, playing Cowboys and Indians, stalking each other in the
tall grass amid yells and whoops that could probably be heard for miles around.

My
mother seemed to welcome our boisterousness. I think she viewed it as evidence
her kids were happy and healthy. However, she was fearful that our wild
behaviour and noisy exuberance, fully developed from years of living in the
open spaces of the bush, would not be appreciated by Nan’s neighbours. Nan
dismissed Mum’s worries with a wave of her hand.

“They’re
just doing what children should do,” she said. “The neighbours’ll get used to
them.”

My
mother laughed.

“What
about you, Mum?” she asked. “Will you get used to them?”

“The
kids make me feel young,” Nan said. “It’s good to have young ones around the
house.”

Nan
went back to puffing contentedly on her pipe. It had been Pop’s pipe. She had
taken it over after his death even though she had not previously been a smoker.
Nan’s impish grin answered Mum’s bemused expression the first time she saw her
mother-in-law smoking Pop’s pipe.

“Kinda
keeps him with me,” Nan said.

The
feel of his pipe, the intimacy of it and of course the familiar aroma of the
tobacco must have given her the experience of Pop, almost as though he were
still alive. Having us around must have also provided a suitable distraction
from her grief because she adjusted well to the unaccustomed explosion of children
in her house. One concern she did have at first was that Bloomers, her pet cow,
might be frightened with so many noisy children around. But the cow did not
seem to care at all.

 Bloomers
had been with Nan and Pop on the dairy farm and when they moved into town the
cow moved with them. Nan kept Bloomers in the back yard which was not fenced
off. In the mornings, Bloomers was usually tied up to the clothes line. It was
probably not the wisest choice of stakes because Bloomers got her name from her
habit of eating almost anything, including a pair of Nan’s large bloomers. In
the afternoons Nan untied Bloomers so she could wander off to the vacant block
next door to eat some of the delicious green grass.

“Don’t
go beyond that paddock. You hear me?” Nan would call out as the cow dawdled
away with a flick of her tail.

Bloomers
was an obedient cow but she did once get Nan into a spot of bother. One morning
there was a knock on Nan’s front door. This was unusual because most people
would walk along the side path, past the kitchen window and around to the back
door. The front door was only for strangers and bad news. That’s what it was
this particular morning: bad news. When Nan opened the door, old Bernie Johnson
was standing there with a thunderous look on his face. Old Bernie lived across
from Nan and down a few doors. He didn’t care too much for people. He didn’t
really care too much for anything except his garden, especially his dahlias
which had won prizes at the Bairnsdale flower show.

When
Nan opened the door, old Bernie said, “Mrs. Rowley, your damn cow’s eating my
dahlias.”

Nan
sprang into action!

“That
stupid cow,” she said.

She
was off down the front steps in her slippers and virtually rolled down the path
with her walking stick propelling her along.

“If
I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times; don’t go beyond that
paddock,” she muttered to herself.

Off
she went across the road and down to Bernie’s place.  Sure enough, there
was the ‘damn cow’ happily munching away, the wine-red petals of Bernie’s prize
dahlia’s still hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Nan
waved her walking stick and shouted. The poor cow got such a fright it bolted.
Nan went after her. Past the rows of dahlias, through Bernie Johnson’s
cauliflower patch and out through the gate, across the road and down the hill
and around the block they went, both of them kicking up dust.

It
was when they were coming back up the hill behind Nan’s place that Nan gave up
the chase. The cow kept going.

Nan
hobbled down the well-worn dirt path in the back yard, huffing and puffing and
muttering and shaking her head. She was a bit taken aback when she saw Bloomers
still tethered to the clothes line happily munching on the grass around the
base of the post.  It never occurred to Nan that the cow in old Bernie’s
dahlia patch wasn’t Bloomers. She hadn’t stopped to think that it was morning
and Bloomers was only untethered in the afternoons.

Nan
pulled up abreast of Bloomers and took a moment to catch her breath.

“You
stupid cow,” she said as she moved on towards the back door.

Some
might have called Nan eccentric but she was the only Nan I had in my life and I
thought she was the best Nan ever. She took pleasure in teaching me how to make
cakes, pastry and scones. 

“Anyone
can cook meat and vegetables. But baking? Now that’s an art,” she said.

 On
Saturday afternoons the two of us would have fun together in the kitchen. I
learned to make cakes and sponges long before I could boil an egg. Her
favourite things to make were scones; we made those a lot.

“Making
good scones is a skill not many people learn,” Nan said. “I’ll teach you how to
do it. First you need a good recipe. Get me that recipe book in the top
drawer.”

 Her
CWA recipe book was in constant use. The CWA (Country Women’s Association) is
an organisation that supports women living in isolated areas. The cakes and
scones made by their members and often sold at fund raising street stalls were
legendary. Many of these recipes were collected and published. Most country
women had a copy of at least one CWA recipe book.

I
opened Nan’s up to the page for scones which was yellow from a blend of milk,
egg and flour stains. She had her bowl ready on the table with the ingredients
arranged around it: flour, salt, butter, bi-carbonate of soda, cream of tartar
and milk.

“Now,”
she said. “Read out to me what it says.”

“Sift
flour and salt. Lightly rub in the butter. Then sift in the raising agents and
mix well.”

“That’s
right,” said Nan.

However,
she demonstrated a blithe disregard for the precise instructions of the CWA
experts, throwing all the dry ingredients into the bowl and mixing them
together with her hands. Then she poured the milk in and stirred the mixture
roughly with a wooden spoon.

“Now
what does it say, little’un?”

“Add
all the milk and mix lightly to a spongy dough.”

“I’ve
already done that step,” said Nan.

 “Knead
very lightly and roll out to half an inch thick.”

Nan
lifted the mixture onto the floured table and flattened it with her hand.

“Cut
out with a two inch cutter.”

Nan
grabbed a bone-handled knife and cut the flattened dough into squares.

“Brush
with egg or milk.”

 Nan
splashed water over the tops of her lumpy squares.

“Bake
in a hot oven.”

 “That
bit is important,” she said.

She
sprinkled some flour on a baking tray and placed it in the oven for a few
seconds. When it turned brown, she nodded her head in approval. Using a
tea-towel to protect her hands, she removed the baking tray. Then she sprinkled
more flour on the baking tray and together we lined up her rough scone squares
on it. Into the oven they went. Ten minutes later, out they came, browned on
the top, three times as big as they were when they went in and each one as
light as a feather.

“Perfect,”
she said. “It helps to have a good recipe.”

In
the summer evenings Nan encouraged our noisy ebullience with sing-alongs. She
taught us the words to the songs so that we could sing with her. Since none of
us seemed to have inherited our father and grandmother’s keen ear for a tune,
the result probably sounded like a raucous cacophony of strangled canaries. In
our blissful ignorance we belted out the tunes together, rising to a crackling
crescendo during choruses such as:
Hooray and up she rises, earlie in the
morning.
We also performed a rousing rendition of a song called
Deep in
the Heart of Texas
. We clapped our hands with the tune and my brothers
hollered like cowboys at regular intervals.

Dad
would sometimes join in the singing sessions but often, tired after his day’s
work, he preferred to sit in Pop’s chair reading the paper.

Less
than a year after we moved into our new home, Mum was expecting another child.
Dad had joked that with Irene, now three years old, sleeping in their room they
would have little opportunity for ‘hanky panky’ as she grew older. He told Mum
they should ‘make hay while the sun shines’. That had made my mother blush but
apparently they had done just as he suggested. Peter, Mum and Dad’s seventh
child, was born in May 1960.

“Look
at that,” Dad said proudly when he first laid eyes on the newborn. “Another
chip off the old block, eh, Mum?”

My
mother might have been subdued in her response because she had lost a lot of
blood and was suffering from anaemia. The doctor warned her against having more
children. However, my father was always in high spirits on the birth of a new
child and Peter’s birth was no exception. He held the baby, cocooned in soft
rugs, high above his head to show him off to the rest of us.

“Look
at him. You couldn’t wish for a healthier baby,” he grinned. As Peter’s tiny fingers
grasped his, he added, “and strong as a Mallee bull like his dad. Comes from
good stock, he does.”

I
am sure the arrival of Peter gave my parents hope. Dad’s poor health must have
weighed heavily on their minds. They might have reasoned that there could be
nothing seriously wrong with Dad if he was able to produce a strong, healthy
child.

As
time passed, Dad’s tiredness became worse and the strenuous physical labour of
work in the bush eventually proved too much for him despite his determined
efforts to continue. Peter had not long passed his second birthday when Dad had
to give up being a wood merchant. He started working as a yardman at Marshall’s
hotel, known to the locals as ‘the top pub’ because it was at the top end of
the main street. There was another hotel at the bottom end of the main street
which was, of course, ‘the bottom pub’.

I
am not sure that a diagnosis had been made at this stage because I never heard
either of my parents mention the name of my father’s illness. With my ability
to make myself into an invisible listener, I feel I would have discovered this
secret if they had known it. On the other hand, it is possible they had by this
stage been informed that it was myeloid leukaemia but did not want to say the
words aloud.

It
must have seemed incomprehensible to Mum that a young man, after all Dad had
not yet reached forty when the symptoms first appeared, so physically strong
and positive and passionate about life could suddenly have that life threatened
by a serious illness.  

I
think my father faced the possibility that he would succumb to the disease
before Mum did. I am sure that each time he went to the Alfred Hospital for
further tests, now often accompanied by Nan, Mum imagined they would find a
cure. She probably envisaged him running through the door on his return with
jubilation beaming from every fibre in his body. The nightmare would be over
and she could smile and say, “See, I knew you would get better.” Instead, he
seemed to become weaker.

He
had started to talk about making preparations ‘in case anything happens to me’.
They went through the paperwork together and wrote to the appropriate
government agencies to ensure she had all the necessary documents to claim the
widow’s pension.

“We’ll
always have a roof over our heads, that’s the most important thing,” Mum said.

Dad
nodded. “But you’ll have a lot of mouths to feed too, Myrtle. You’ll need money
for that and for their education.”

“That’s
what the Child Endowment is for,” she told him with a smile. “With that and the
widow’s pension we’ll be just fine. Not that I intend being a widow any time
soon, mind.”

She
laughed but his serious face sobered her mood.

“Honestly,
Dad. We’ll be all right,” she said. “Bobby is already doing part time work and Maxie
will do the same. They’ll both be working full time soon and June is smart
enough to get a scholarship. As far as food is concerned, well, we don’t buy
that much anyway, what with all the food everyone gives us.”