From Strength to Strength

by Sara Henderson

  And into all this was thrown the added pressure of Charles’s four sons from his first marriage. The boys had visited and lived with us in the Philippines and America, and Hugh and Fraser had gone to school in Manila for a period. They were nice enough boys but just their presence added yet another complication to an already impossible undertaking.

  One by one they left the station to live their own lives. Life on Bullo in those days was extremely hard, and it was normal for a young person to want more than just plain hard work, sleep and more hard work. They all left during the failing, debt-ridden years. The place was in a miserable mess and if you didn’t have to stay you didn’t.

  I lost count of the number of times I packed up and left. Sometimes for months on end. It didn’t faze Charles, he would just move in a few females until I returned, and he was always confident I would.

  We were now well and truly into the abattoir business. The ugly tin shed had turned into a large spread with all the additions. We had an abattoir manager, boners, slaughterers, wrappers, slicers, packers, and along with all these people went all the usual problems.

  The abattoir had been built from scratch with never enough money or time to do things properly. And everything that happened there was always a panic, a panic to get the cattle into the yard, a panic to get the meat packed, a panic to get the meat onto the plane, a panic to fuel the plane, you name it, and it was a panic.

  One very funny incident occurred in only the second year of operation. Every year there had to be an inspection of the building before the licence was extended for a further twelve months. At this time, we had a very good head butcher but he was definitely not management material. However, he was all Charles had, so he was put in charge of the spring-cleaning for the inspection. Charles went over the abattoir the day before the inspectors were to arrive and he said it was really quite good, all neat and tidy with everything in place.

  The next morning, the inspectors, Charles and I marched down the flat and into the building. The staff were all very busy and our butcher was boning out.

  Then one of the inspectors looked over in the corner and said, ‘What is that?’

  We all looked in the direction of the accusing finger and there sat the butcher’s fourteen-month-old son in a two-hundred-pound tub of mince. Everyone was horrified and speechless, except the butcher, who replied, ‘That’s me kid.’

  ‘I know it’s a kid, but what’s it doing in a tub of mince?’

  ‘Oh, the missus didn’t feel well today, so I had to look after it. Only place I could find to keep it quiet.’

  Of course the inspector started pencilling furiously. No children allowed in abattoir, one black mark, a naked baby in a tub of mince, goodness knows how many black marks.

  We went back to the house and Charles said the butcher had only been with us for two months and he had never had the baby in the abattoir before. I don’t think they believed him, but it was soon confirmed when the butcher came charging into the house with his son screaming at the top of his lungs.

  It seemed the chemical used to preserve the mince and keep it a bright pink had had a terrible effect on the poor baby’s skin—his legs and behind were red raw and getting worse by the minute. I quickly bathed him and rubbed on some soothing cream, but he had to be taken to hospital. Charles later found out that the mother’s incapacitation was due to a bottle of brandy for breakfast.

  We received our twelve-month extension, but only on the condition that the butcher and his family were never in close proximity to the abattoir again. Of course the two hundred pounds of mince were condemned. All in all, the only ones to profit from that day were the dogs. They ate in style for many weeks and were sad to see the butcher and his mince-playing son leave.

  At this stage in the abattoir business, we had branched out into pigs. We had a new, very opinionated ‘pig man’, and his ambition was to manage Bullo River Station. He would arrive at the kitchen door every morning at five-thirty to discuss the pig schedule for the day. Of course Charles handed him over to me. I did my best to ignore him after the few regular questions, but he would stand there for the next hour or so, expounding on how he would run a cattle station.

  As the weeks progressed, it became obvious that ignoring him was not enough. Charles, with pressure from the abattoir manager, Uncle Dick and a few others, was about to give him his marching orders when the ‘pig man’ took matters into his own hands.

  He appeared in the kitchen one morning very early, while Charles was drinking his coffee.

  ‘Don’t rush your coffee, the plane won’t be loaded today, the staff have gone on strike.’

  Now, the word ‘union’ upset Charles enough, but if you really wanted to see fireworks, tell him his staff was on strike!

  ‘Strike!’ The ‘pig man’ looked a little shocked. He hadn’t expected this violent reaction. ‘I’ll show them what happens to strikers!’ He stormed out of the kitchen towards the bedroom.

  ‘What’s he going to do?’ asked the now very worried ‘pig man’.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But I’m supposed to handle this.’

  ‘Handle what?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m supposed to handle this for him.’

  I started to smell a rat. Charles reappeared loading his pistol. The ‘pig man’ sank to his knees and grabbed Charles’s trouser leg.

  ‘Please, let me handle it. I know I can get them back to work!’

  Charles ignored him and started out the door. The ‘pig man’, still pleading, followed close behind.

  Our abattoir manager told me the rest of the story.

  ‘We could see Charlie charging down the flat with the “pig man” in hot pursuit. I looked at my watch and knew we were not late for the six-thirty loading, so I wondered what the commotion was about. Charlie came barrelling through the door shouting, “Strike will you, eh, strike?! I’ll show you strike!” and started firing pistol shots around the room. It all happened so fast, no one even ducked for cover. We just froze in various stages of eating and drinking, and stared at him. When all the chaos had died down I asked Charles who was on strike.

  ‘“You are!”’

  ‘“No we’re not!”’

  So that was the end of the pig man.

  Another entertaining type was working as general rouse-about. One morning Charles told him to fuel the plane and pointed to the drums of fuel in the paddock nearby.

  Charles then came into the house to get the invoice book and other papers he required for his day in town. Our mechanic, Dick, came into the kitchen with the information for a spare part he required and he and Charles walked out to the plane. A few minutes later Charles was back, hopping mad. Ian had filled the plane with diesel fuel. Luckily he was still pumping it into the tanks when Charles and Dick walked up and they had both immediately noticed the smell of diesel instead of avgas. Charles left Dick out at the plane to supervise the emptying and cleaning of the fuel tanks. All this would take hours, so Charles had to call Darwin and cancel various appointments for the first three hours or so.

  Dick appeared and said the tanks had been emptied and washed through many times and were now ready to be refilled. He had left Ian to do it. After spending all that time helping to empty and clean the tanks, Ian proceeded to fill the plane with diesel again!

  When Charles found out, he was ready to murder him but he could not afford the luxury because he had to stop Dick from doing just that. Dick once more emptied and cleaned the tanks and three hours later he fuelled the plan himself. Charles had a one-way passenger to Darwin. I don’t think Ian ever realised what he had done.

  One day Charles came home with a surprise for me, my first station cook. I thought, how wonderful, a cook. Now I’ll be able to do all the things I never get time for. Boy, was I in for a shock. Until then, I had only been associated with legitimate cooks, by that I mean people who were what they claimed to be. All the cooks I had employed in the Philippines could cook. In the Northern Territory things wor
ked differently.

  My first cook was tall, big, rough and of German origin. However, she had not inherited any typical German traits such as love of work, or devotion to order and cleanliness. She was lazy, dirty, and the worst food mutilator this side of the black stump. She covered everything with instant gravy. Each morning she would make ten gallons of this gluck and pour it over whatever she served for breakfast, lunch or dinner. You couldn’t tell what was underneath, but maybe that was just as well. The men complained bitterly but I enjoyed not being in the kitchen, so I tried to encourage her to improve her cooking.

  However, after a few weeks it was evident that her heart was not in her cooking. When she wasn’t chasing one of the stockmen or trying to steal their grog, she could be found at the kitchen table cleaning her fingernails (my orders) with a can opener (not my orders). She had to go.

  The next time Charles decided he would steer clear of the local talent and try his luck in the South. The result was certainly something different. After her first night on the rum of the North (which is about four times stronger than regular rum), she informed everyone that she was a striptease artist. The men encouraged her to perform but she said she couldn’t because she didn’t have all her props. This statement caused great amazement because as far as I was concerned, and indeed everyone else, she was one big performance from sunrise to sunset. The only part of the act that was missing was the music.

  She never used the buttons on a blouse above the navel, and the cheeks that made the men walk into closed doors weren’t the ones she put her make-up on. Of course the last thing she could do was cook. In fact, she had a mental seizure trying to boil water. I asked her why she applied for the job when she couldn’t cook, and she said she’d wanted a change, she thought it would be fun.

  Next came a fiery character! We were back with cooks from the North, and she was a very nice person when sober, but wow, when she was drunk . . . When we met her in town for the interview, she was neatly dressed and very well-mannered.

  Of course I was not experienced in spotting the signs of an alcoholic. Up to that point in my life I had not met any, or at least lived in close proximity with any.

  We discovered she was an alcoholic about two hours after she arrived at the station. It turned out she couldn’t survive three hours without a drink.

  She had one thing in her favour—she could cook, that is if you could keep her sober long enough. So I persevered.

  To make sure the grog was out of temptation’s way, I moved it into our caravan and hid it under one of the bunks. The next night, drunk on grog she’d stolen from the men, she came screaming into the caravan and attacked Charles, demanding a drink. We couldn’t calm her down, so we locked her in her room. After smashing everything possible, she fell asleep.

  The next morning she was as meek as a kitten, but I told Charles she had to go. I didn’t want the children to grow up thinking this was normal night-time behaviour.

  The following evening, when I was tucking the children in, the youngest asked, ‘Is Auntie Joan going to put on another show tonight?’

  The long line of cooks continued, almost all hopeless at cooking. I grew very tired of paying these people to cook, while still doing a lot of it myself, either because they were drunk, or because the staff refused to eat what they produced.

  There were only two good cooks in that endless parade. Both were young, friendly and cheerful, and best of all they could cook. Everyone regretted their departure but both were travelling around the world and could only stay a limited time. One stayed seven months, the other nearly six.

  Two other cooks stand out in my mind, but not because of their cooking. The first of these had a hang-up about knives. She would hide all the knives in her room and every time I wanted to cut something, I would have to ask her for a knife. She would then ask endless questions as to why I needed it.

  She would take the knives when I was in the office or talking on the phone. I would tell her to put the knives back, and eventually they would all be returned to the kitchen, only to have them disappear again the moment I turned my back.

  She was a hopeless cook, so I didn’t put up with this for long. I moved back into the kitchen to cook and she became dishwasher and domestic. This did not sit well with her and she became even more troublesome. As well as stealing all the knives, she started turning off the stove. I would put a roast in the oven and go to do other work, then come back an hour later to find the oven off and the meat still raw. She finally wouldn’t talk to me at all, only to Charles, which of course made it impossible for me to get her to do anything.

  I told Charles to take her out on the plane as I couldn’t stand it any more. He said he would look for another cook, but maybe she would be alright in the abattoir. We always needed more people in the meat-wrapping section. I didn’t care where she went as long as it was out of my sight.

  Two days later, our abattoir manager came to Charles and said, ‘Either she goes, or I go!’ Her knife-hiding caper was causing havoc in the abattoir, not to mention the effect on production. She’d hidden all the knives on her very first morning while the staff were at morning tea. Charles finally took her to Darwin.

  The next one was a wonderful cook—good down-to-earth country fare. She was everyone’s idea of what a grandma should be, at least on the surface.

  Each morning after breakfast we would sit down with a cup of tea to plan lunch and dinner for that day and breakfast for the next morning. At first things went smoothly, but then one day . . . Well, it went something like this:

  We sat down as usual with our cup of tea.

  ‘What meals do you want today?’

  ‘Well, let’s see. Maybe lunch, hamburgers, onions, potatoes, vegies and custard and jelly for dessert.’

  ‘Right,’ came her brisk reply. This was out of character for a start. She was usually very chatty and had some comment or suggestions, but I thought maybe she was not feeling well and did not attach too much importance to the change.

  After I had discussed the day’s meals I went into my office. About an hour or so later, I looked up from the accounts to find her standing beside me. The expression on her face was one of annoyance.

  ‘Something wrong?’ I ventured.

  ‘I would like to know what I’m expected to cook today,’ came the terse reply.

  ‘But I told you,’ I said in disbelief.

  ‘You did not!’

  Something in her voice told me it was a waste of time following this line of conversation, so I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to come to the kitchen this morning to discuss it with you.’

  ‘That’s right, that’s why I’m here,’ she said in very emphatic tones.

  ‘Right,’ I said slowly, desperately searching for an answer to this weird and wonderful exchange.

  ‘Right,’ I said again. We then repeated the conversation we had had an hour before, in the kitchen, over a cup of tea.

  ‘Good,’ came the brisk reply, ‘as long as I know the plan I can keep to a schedule.’ She then turned sharply in military style and marched out of the room.

  Shaking my head and sighing deeply, I returned to my bookwork. About an hour later I was on the phone when she burst into the room. I told the person on the phone I would call back, put the phone down and gave her a withering look. It had no effect.

  ‘I can’t be expected to serve meals on time if you don’t discuss them with me!’

  By this time I was getting annoyed.

  ‘I’ve told you what I want cooked!’

  ‘Then why would I be here now?’

  I had a few choice answers to that, but refrained. I decided to change tack.

  ‘What do you suggest we have?’ I then sat there and listened while she repeated exactly what I had told her twice that morning.

  ‘That sounds wonderful,’ I said.

  She smiled and left the room mumbling about how she was expected to do everything.

  For the rest of the day I was left in peace, and
I began to think it was just a one-off event. I was wrong. The next day we went through the normal routine of meal planning, I went to my office, and, right on cue, an hour later, she appeared.

  ‘I’m still waiting for you to tell me the meals for the day,’ she said, with her arms folded and a look of annoyance on her face. Realising this was now an ongoing problem, and likely to be repeated daily, I thought I would shortcut the routine.

  ‘Well, what do you think we should have?’ I asked.

  She looked at me for a few seconds, then said, ‘I’m here to cook the food, not to decide what to cook! I’m not paid to do the thinkin’!’

  Again I had a good answer to that remark but I held my tongue. We started to repeat the whole procedure but eventually I lost my temper.

  ‘I don’t care what you cook, just go away!’ I said.

  She departed, saying, ‘Well, if you can’t make up your mind over a few simple meals, I suppose it’s up to me.’

  She walked out of the office and proceeded to cook exactly what we had discussed at breakfast. The next day I typed out the meals and left the menu on the kitchen table. Every time she appeared to tell me she had not seen any typed instructions, I silently handed her a copy.

  The following day I went one step further. I left the menu on the kitchen table, then locked the office door.

  That night she spoke to Charles. She said she had noticed I was acting most peculiarly and maybe he should get some medical advice. In the meantime, however, she didn’t really want to work around anyone with mental problems, it made her nervous. So she left.

  The background to our two slightly off-beat cooks was later revealed when the employment agency sent us an extraordinary expense bill for hiring them. After many discussions, a casual remark revealed the truth.

  ‘It’s impossible to believe we would get two people in a row with serious mental problems, you must be near an institution.’