Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  The wood heap, where all the chopping was done, lay at the foot of the yard in close proximity to the ramshackle shed in which sat the copper and two big tin tubs, plus shelves stacked with little bricks of soap; Nanna made her own. The laundry’s water wasn’t drawn from the house tanks. It came from the bore drain, was undrinkably hard, and made the washing stiff — clean, but stiff. The wood heap itself was a rough circle about twelve feet in diameter, its floor deep in wood chips too hard ever to rot into humus. In the middle of the chips sat several chopping blocks of various heights; the main one was a huge old tree still rooted in the earth. Its top was defaced by fissures and missing bits, but it never seemed to wear out.

  Beyond the wood heap reared two different mountains of logs: one consisted of the raw product carted from the paddocks, and the other of the chunks prepared for the woodshed but too green and sappy yet to burn. Both piles weathered as they sat there awaiting the attention of a family axe; saws were reserved for across-the-bole sectioning to a uniform length — more or less. The family men were awesome with an axe; chopping built muscles even harder than the wood.

  The woodshed was on the verge of the wood heap, positioned so that Laurie and Nanna could get wood from it for either the laundry copper or the kitchen stove. They shifted it in an old pram — a baby buggy. The woodshed’s framework was disused bits of building timber — four-by-twos or six-by-twos made no matter. Once the frame was up, sheets of corrugated galvanized iron were nailed over it. The result wasn’t pretty: some sheets were bent, some buckled, some raggedly cut; but for a woodshed, they’d do.

  The wood was stacked inside as neatly as such deformed and misshapen pieces could be, rising up to the roof in each row. The entrance was in the middle of one long side, and all the rows of wood came down to this person-sized gap.

  It wasn’t as dark inside the woodshed as one might inagine. Thin blue rays filled with dizzily dancing dust fingered out of old nail holes, and a huge golden mist of light radiated from the middle entrance. The rows of wood around this central space had been pillaged first, sitting in steps and stairs made comfy by big hessian sacks, put there in case it rained heavily enough to leak through the old nail holes — a rare event.

  If one were inside it, the woodshed held an exquisite peace, quite why is beyond all but the conscious thought of an infant. The wood itself was vividly colored — pinks, reds, rust-browns, oranges, bright yellows, like a Turner sunset. Spiders spun webs, wispy and silvery, slater beetles spilled from under a chunk when it was moved, and the shadows were full of mystery. It vibrated as if on the verge of giving voice to a glorious note.

  Lazy people chopped the foot-long segments of log dragged in from the paddocks as they needed them, but that entailed a permanent enslavement to the woodpiles. My family cut the wood ready for the stove or copper twice a year, leaving Laurie and Nanna with only two chores: fetching the day’s wood from the woodshed, and chopping kindling out of fruit crates, soft drink boxes, inch-thick slabs of bark. The wood chips from around the chopping blocks were handy too, but soon ran out. As for paper — all we had was the daily newspaper, scarcely sufficient.

  The first feminine job of the day was to use the still-glowing embers in the kitchen stove firebox to generate a fresh fire, feeding it kindling until it would “catch” a standard chunk. This would not have been possible were it not that these irregular pieces were smothered in vicious splinters the size of skewers; it was the splinters caught first, transmitted their purgatory to the iron of heartwood. Once the fire was going, the great cast-iron kettle was dragged across the plates until it was right above the flames striking like fiery cobras into the vestibule between the firebox and the stove’s surface. There it boiled quickly; breakfast was not breakfast without many cups of scalding, treacle-black tea, the bushman’s eternal pick-me-up.

  Our mother, Laurie, and our father, Jim, hated each other. That is no exaggeration. In fact, some lexicographer should have coined a new word capable of carrying hatred to unheard-of heights; then it might have fitted Laurie and Jim. Never since I left childhood and “home” behind have I encountered such festering poison as filled the very air around Laurie and Jim. In computer-animated films, there is an occasional character whose head is wreathed is weird lightning; well, the moment Laurie and Jim were together in the same room, that weird lightning played a fantastic lacework around their heads.

  As toddlers it numbed our senses, filled us with a panic that, if the battle raged on, led to blind terror. We were not old enough to know what was happening, especially once the terror consumed us. This time our world was sure to end, though even that was a logical thought we probably couldn’t have fathomed. How does one describe horrified, terrified, blind panic in very small children?

  We did understand one concrete thing: the woodshed. Carl and I would flee to the woodshed, the one place we knew no one would ever think to look for us. And there, clutching each other, howling until the tears and snot near suffocated us, hearts like roaring drums in our ears, shivering and shuddering in awful fear, we waited for the end of all things.

  He was such a dear little chap, Carl. Nearly sixteen months younger than I, he was mine to protect, console, shelter, comfort, soothe. I was Carl’s big sister, a job I took very seriously, and at no time was my job more important than when Laurie and Jim went to war.

  The memories flood back: of Carl’s silky little nut under my cheek, of his baby’s feet in their red shoes set close together, of his tiny hands hanging desperately onto mine. The first time we found the woodshed, panicked out of whatever reason toddlers have, it was to reach a secure haven in the teeth of pursuing monsters too unspeakable to conceptualize; we crossed a chasm into a foreign land, and were safe.

  Of course one can’t cry forever, just as the worst battle in a marital war can’t last forever. At long last Carl and I would cease our frenzied crying, huddle together on a pile of hessian sacks, and go to sleep. In the house, the exchange of hostilities would peter out until Laurie, in noisy tears, would lock Jim out of their bedroom, and Jim cycled off to the local pub to drink with his mates and heap curses on the heads of all women. Not that he was a drunk. Jim was an expert at leaving just before it was his turn to buy a round.

  And Nanna, our gentle grandmother, would sneak to the woodshed and get us out of it before Laurie knew where we were. Nanna never betrayed our bolt-hole. Hers was the laundry.

  I can still see the woodshed when I close my eyes: those thin blue rays, the golden mist, silver whiskers of spider web all over alluring crannies, dotted with the deadly black bodies having red stripes down their backs. Odd, that neither Carl nor I was ever bitten. The mosaic of brilliantly colored wood. I can still smell the acrid tang of damp hardwood, the musky aroma of slaters, the mouldy stench of hessian bags.

  Though what I see and smell is a combination of a dozen and more woodsheds; we never stayed long in one place.

  Nor did Jim stay long. Suffering from battle fatigue, I imagine, he was off to North Queensland and the sugar cane again within six months. Laurie alone wasn’t exactly any child’s idea of a joyous, attentive mother, but at least there was no Jim to light her fuse.

  I wonder what tiny children do for a woodshed if they live in an apartment building? Do they survive, do you think?

  JIM

  If to call a man “Dad” or “Pa” or “Pop” is to have a father, then I didn’t have a father. The man who fathered me was named James — always Jim for short — and to this day I think of him as “Jim.” No one in the family, including my mother, Laurie, ever referred to Jim as Dad or Daddy either directly to me or in my hearing, so it was quite natural that I called this relative stranger Jim, the same as everybody else did. Jim never voiced any objection, or asked me to call him Dad. When my brother, Carl, arrived nearly sixteen months after me, he called our father Jim too. Our earliest memories revolved around Jim’s physical appearance rather than his personality: his shoes were so huge we spoke of them as “boats” and used t
o gape up at him with necks craning, he was so immensely tall. Had the Empire State Building paid us visits, I think our reaction would have been much the same.

  Like my essay on my mother, “Laurie”, which should be read after “Jim”, there won’t be a strict chronology or even logic to this. The core emotions are not involved because love never entered our perceptions of our father; that awesome skyscraper metaphor has been thoughtfully chosen.

  Setting me aside for a moment, Jim never seemed to have any of that inexplicable pride makes a man dote on his son even if he has scant regard for his daughter. Apparently Jim despised his son as a weakling and a — his word — poofter, though Carl was neither. His grounds for doing so? That Carl elected to stay in high school after he could legally have left, that he went to university, that he “wasted” himself by teaching mentally retarded children. As far as Jim was concerned, the mentally retarded were a group of human beings who should be sent to the gas ovens. To Jim, Josef Stalin was the greatest man who ever lived. I suspect he admired Hitler too, but wasn’t game to say so. Jim could never see the point of spending public moneys on the kinds of people who showed no useful dividends. Be a person mentally retarded or a drug addict, send ’em to the gas ovens!

  The fact that Jim’s son was a champion cricketer and field hockey player did not impress the man who had been, in his time, a British Empire cross-country running gold medallist. I add that Jim never contributed a penny to his children’s educations, and that the allowance he paid to our mother was as small as it was grudging. Carl and I survived on full scholarships; we also worked during our school vacations as soon as we looked old enough to pass for the working age.

  Laurie always held some kind of job, and we had one of those wonderful backups, a resident grandmother we called Nanna.

  Laurie’s family, a large collection of bachelor brothers, lived with us off and on, and we knew them by yet another strange twist of nomenclature: Tom, Harry, Walter and the rest were just that, never prefaced by the word “Uncle”.

  Whereas Jim was the only member of his family we ever knew. Both parents were secretive; trying to find out information about either of them was nigh impossible, but at this juncture I will report what I know about James Joseph McCullough before he became an unwilling husband and father.

  Jim’s family were Orange Ulstermen, imported to Northern Ireland from whichever of Scotland’s two Uist Islands was the Protestant one to fight the Irish in William and Mary’s time, and they had lived in Belfast ever since. On two or three occasions Jim described the kind of place Belfast was during his childhood and youth: machine-gun fire was so common that on hearing it, pedestrians automatically dived for the ground. The Black and Tans happened. It must have been a fascinating and dangerous existence, but Jim refused to expand upon it. Talking of it seemed to make him edgy.

  His father was a foreman in a linen mill, and sired four boys and one girl before a mill explosion blew his side out and he spent however much longer he lived lying on a couch. Jim’s mother was Welsh, by name of Hughes — I don’t know her first name — and, I gather, a formidable woman who voted dozens of times in the Belfast elections and could add up the grocer’s bill quicker and more accurately upside down than the grocer could the right way up. The whole neighborhood was terrified of her. With her husband immobilized (I suspect the mill management wriggled out of paying any compensation — that was the usual story of the time) she dragooned the only girl into becoming her unpaid skivvy, and opened a boarding house for men.

  John, the eldest, stayed in Belfast. The other three boys emigrated. Jim’s favorite brother, Robert, settled in Durban, South Africa, and one made his home somewhere in North America. Jim (born in 1903) chose the continent in between, Australia. He liked the Outback, where he worked as a station hand, which is very interesting: a city boy, and from a violent city at that, must have been remarkably adaptable to learn rural pursuits from riding a horse to shearing a sheep. It says he was intelligent, and that his cleverness was well organized.

  One of the most intriguing facets of his character was his addiction to extremely hard physical labor. As a result, he was never out of a job, and was, besides, all things to all men; when not being prodded by Laurie’s pitchfork or his children’s betrayal of his Communist ideals, he was the most charming fellow one could possibly meet.

  A stunning-looking man, Jim. Six foot three inches tall, he had a whippy physique and long, very muscular legs; his height was in those amazing legs, which certainly indicated that he might have been a champion long distance runner. His hair, brows and lush lashes were jet black, but his eyes were a startling blue that contained no trace of brown or yellow. Widely set and well opened, they had a permanent look of innocence. By anyone’s standards his face was strikingly handsome; he even had one of those noses people are always asking plastic surgeons to give them — the correct term, I think, is retroussé. His nose is one of the few things I inherited from him, but I also inherited his height, five foot ten, and towered over Laurie, at five foot two. How she hated being towered over!

  Jim had a picture of his mother — what happened to it I do not know — that revealed one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen. She had the same black hair and light eyes — blue, I presume. Such a pity there were no color photographs! Perhaps here I can slip in the fact that she died untimely. An undiagnosed diabetic, she broke her leg when she was in her early fifties and suffered the inevitable fate of the Belfast poor, be they Green or Orange: the tissue became gangrenous, and killed her. Jim was broken hearted, it seems mostly because he had never gotten home to see her after he left at twenty-one.

  I have no idea how Jim and Laurie met, though I should hasten to say that I did call my mother “Mum” — it simply seems more appropriate in these reminiscences to call her by her given name too. I always liked the sound of it, its look on paper.

  From her photos, Laurie was an ordinary young woman, except, I gather, for a mass of wonderful red-gold hair. But her nose was far too big, her mouth liplessly thin, and her expression had worn itself into permanent discontent even as a child. She was thin and flat-chested, but she did have excellent legs, all of which endowed her with the kind of figure young flappers of the 1920s sighed for. Not that Laurie was a flapper. Anything but.

  The middle child of a large family, all Laurie’s siblings were brothers. Some were older, some younger. She seems to have been spoiled rotten, and my sensitive nose sniffs a hint of Electra in the family. She was deeply attached to her father, who was so possessive of her that he refused to let her take a job. She was still living at home well into her twenties when, somewhere, she met Jim, who I gather was the most desirable young man in the district — at least to look at. His penniless situation was patent to all, but Laurie wasn’t sensible enough to incorporate financial prosperity into a marital equation. A man of thirty, his looks and hard-to-catch reputation were sufficient for the twenty-four-year-old Laurie, who would have known of his reputation as a hard worker and presumed this meant they would get on in the world.

  Jim probably felt that it was time to settle down, become a family man; that his eye fell upon Laurie is logical for one like him. What he saw was an only girl with heaps of brothers, an inexperienced virgin who had been kept at home to act as the servant of a family of men. An unpaid skivvy just like his own sister in Belfast. Ideal! he would have concluded. A wife who was already broken in as a slave to men, and who would therefore never stand up to him or defy him.

  Alas for Jim! He couldn’t have been more wrong if he had tried. He married Laurie in 1932 and they went to North Queensland on their honeymoon, 1,500 miles from Laurie’s home. Jim was thinking about cutting sugar cane, by far the highest paid of all manual labor. Irresistible!

  But when he treated Laurie as a quasi-person without rights of any kind, Laurie returned to live with her own family.

  Just how things were during those early years I have no idea; no child was ever more ignorant of the prelude to
her genesis than I. Where it happened, how it happened, why it happened — all complete mysteries, since some years had elapsed between marriage and my conception. What I do know is that they never seemed to have lived together, set up house together. Jim spent his time cutting sugar cane in North Queensland while Laurie lived with her own people.

  Whatever the answer, Jim must have managed to do the deed around about September of 1936, when Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson’s grasp on the new king, Edward VIII, was tightening fast, as I was born on June 1st, 1937, under the reign of a different king, George VI. From various remarks Laurie made over the decades, it seems she loathed the sexual act. Perhaps, then, around the New Year of 1938, Jim managed to get her tiddly; Carl was born on September 23rd, 1938. And I suspect that was the end of any voluntary sex on Laurie’s part — if there ever had been genuinely voluntary sex at all.

  Though Jim made occasional visits, they continued not to live together through all the sugar cane years — 1932 until 1950, when Jim, pockets bulging, retired from the sugar. By this time we had moved to Sydney and were living in a house Laurie’s brothers bought, though it was put in Jim’s name on the condition that it pass to Carl. This ownership was, so to speak, Jim’s fee for permitting the brothers to live with Laurie and Nanna. The brothers had all been soldiers during World War II, whereas Jim took the rural dispensation and didn’t fight; to have done so, Jim was always ready to explain, would have meant the abrogation of his Communist ideals.

  I wish I knew under what circumstances Jim retired and took up residence in Laurie’s bed, but the truth is that I just cannot remember. Save that the Woodshed Wars of our infancy now became the Death Duel — whoever of them, Jim or Laurie, died first, lost the war, and that war mattered to both of them more than we did.