by Fiona Kidman
‘We’ll live off the land,’ he told my mother, his voice passionate in its excitement. ‘You’ll see, this is no nine-to-five sinecure with nothing to live for except a pension.’
He followed her around for weeks, pleading with her to listen to sense. Then he went away, and when he came back my mother said she’d go. She gave him her post office book with all her savings and told him to add it to the rehab money from the army. ‘Just go ahead,’ she said, ‘buy a place. I’ll manage.’
My father loved Alderton from the beginning. My mother loathed it. A lot of people had come out there from China, remnants of the imperial army stationed around Shanghai and Tientsin, at the end of the twenties. They’d emigrated to New Zealand rather than go back to England because they had got used to warmer weather, and they hoped their lives might go on much as they had in China; they planted fruit trees and planned to live off the land. There were some disappointments in store: the living was not as cheap as they expected, and servants were almost impossible to come by. Some of the better-off settlers built big houses; others had to make do with rickety cottages, but they behaved as if they were in palaces anyway. You could step through a crooked door frame into a room full of jade treasures; an ornate silk screen would divide the kitchen from the dining room. A bunch of weather-beaten men and women, getting their hands dirty for the first time, holding parties on the wobbly wooden verandahs of their shacks in the evenings, jitterbugging and drinking gin. They were about as different as you could get from anyone else, around then, at the end of the war. Men like my father and Kurt Pile, as unalike as they were, could be as fanciful or neurotic or sad as they wanted to be, and nobody really cared. The settlers had their own world, and if you were not part of it you were invisible. My father thought he might be able to join it; my mother thought he was deluding himself. He might have been in the army and born in England, but he was from another class of people. Never an officer. They knew.
In the beginning, my parents raised poultry for quick cash, but it took them years to get established. They milked a few cows, separating the cream through their hand-rotated Alfa Laval, and fed the whey to the pigs. Eventually, they planted citrus and tamarillo orchards and filled their garden with cantaloupes, aubergines (or eggplants as they were called then) and capsicums, whatever was rare and exotic at the time, like pepinos with smooth marbled skins and smoky flesh, dragon fruit without the seeds. The trouble was, everything had to be done every day. My mother could accept that, but my father didn’t always want to be there. He went away down south when he was supposed to be milking the cows or weeding in the orchard, while she found jobs to keep them going. He often spent days writing letters or just reading. He liked nostalgic books about the English countryside where, it seemed, it was always May and the larks never stopped singing.
My mother took a job for a while, cooking for one of the military wives. The woman, who was called Gloria, wore long beads, and silk scarves as headbands, the knot tied at the back so the ends drifted over her shoulders. She held her tailormades in an ivory cigarette-holder, or, when rations ran out, smoked fat rolled lasiandra buds that smelled like Egyptian tobacco as they burned. My mother reported for duty at seven each morning. The cookhouse was at the bottom of the garden of a big house. Gloria had a rope strung from the house to the cookhouse with a bell on my mother’s end. When she pulled once, she wanted fresh tea, and when the bell rang twice, she wanted hot toast.
‘If I ring three times, it’s for an emergency,’ Gloria told her friends with a tinkling laugh. ‘I know cook will rescue me.’
My mother left for work right after she and my father milked the cows. It was supposed to be my father’s job to get me up and send me to school. He simply forgot some days, except to say stand up straight, girl. A part of him seemed to think he was still in the army, although you wouldn’t have thought so to look at him. On these mornings, his smart clothes were put away in the wardrobe; he dressed in baggy pants held up by braces. He was a smoker too, wreaths of smoke curling around his head as he read on, regardless of anything but the book propped in front of him.
He didn’t know how I watched this silent life of his. I discovered what a man’s body looked like when I spied him taking a bath. A curtained window divided the cottage from the lean-to containing a tin bath and a copper for heating water and washing clothes. Usually, we had baths one after another, using the same grey suds to save water. One morning, after he had been away for a time, he heated the copper and took an unexpected bath. I raised the curtain, and he was rubbing himself dry in the shadowy room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflection of the flames from the copper fire. When I was a young woman, I saw Oliver Reed in Women in Love and I was reminded of my father, that same pale English skin, the colour of potato flesh. He was long and spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.
I learned that my father had an army friend called Frank whom he often used to ring up after my mother left for work.
‘Tolls please,’ he would say nervously after he had rung the exchange. And then, after a pause, ‘I want to make a collect call.’ He would give the operator a number for down south. ‘Eight A, Hunterville.’ I can still hear him say it. Short long in Morse code. After a period of negotiation with someone at the other end, punctuated by silences, I would hear his voice, joyful and light, ‘Frank, my old mate, how are you? Just thought I’d ring for a natter.’
At which point, he would suddenly check to see where I was. ‘Hold on a tick, old boy,’ he’d say to the person on the other end, looking at me. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone to school?’ Eventually, I got bored with these mornings of idleness and started getting dressed and walking to school on my own, although I was often so late that one of the teachers phoned home and, by chance, caught my mother.
‘Why?’ she asked my father when she had put the phone down. ‘Why can’t you do what you say you will?’
‘Why do you nag?’ His voice had that pleading sound again.
‘How can I live with a man who calls me a nag? Why don’t you just say shrew and be done with it?’
‘Shrew,’ he said, testing the word on his tongue and laughing. She didn’t laugh with him.
Then she said, ‘Look, I know it’s hard coming back from the war. I know things happened that I can’t understand. Why don’t we just have a rest today and we’ll do the chores together?’
‘What about your job?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said airily. ‘I pulled the bell off the string yesterday and dropped it in the river.’
‘You did what? Is this a joke?’
‘Not at all.’
‘What will they think of us?’ He put his hand to his forehead.
‘I’ve got no idea,’ she said and laughed. ‘They asked for something special for afternoon tea the other day, something sweet and light, chocolate but Oriental, something with a little ginger in it. “All of those things in one dish?” I said. “Well, cook, if you could rattle something up we’ll leave it to you,” said Madam Gloria. So I took everything I could find in the kitchen and mixed it all up together and iced it and left it to cool, and, when it looked right, I cut it into pieces and served it when the guests came. As I was pouring tea, they were all saying things like, isn’t this delicious, and where did you find the recipe, and is this the new cook’s doing? So then she said, “Oh, the woman’s very good at taking instructions, she can follow a recipe, I’ll give her that.”’
‘You’re making this up.’ My father was horrified and laughing all at once.
‘No, I’m not. So then she said, “I’ll get cook to write it down for you,” without giving me so much as a look. All right, I thought, all right. And I went back down the path and waited for the bell to ring, and when it did I pulled it so hard it came off in my hand. So I threw it away.’
‘In the river?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then did you go?’ I could see he was working out whether this situation could
be redeemed.
‘No. I waited for her to turn up, trotting down the path in her tatty old silk dress, looking hot and bothered, and she said, “Where’s the tea?” and I told her what I thought about her job. I said, “It’s much harder to find a cook than to keep one,” and I handed her my apron. “You might need this,” I said.’
My father looked at her as if he’d seen her for the first time.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘you’re a damn fine woman.’ He was laughing so hard he could hardly stop. ‘We can sell a few more eggs.’
‘They’ll probably think I poisoned them,’ my mother said darkly.
She bought nuts and spices and made the recipe for my father and me. She continued to make it every Christmas time and at birthdays, her wicked ginger treat.
One winter, my father’s friend Frank came to stay, not exactly with us, although he took his meals at our house. Frank was a much younger man than my father. He had full fresh cheeks and a raspberry-coloured mouth and thick eyelashes. In later life he would turn plump. You could see it then in the softness under his chin. His jacket exuded a grassy smell mixed with cigarette smoke, and bananas, his favourite food. He spent his first few nights at the Homestead, a kind of planters’ hotel in the village, with ramshackle accommodation and the only bar in twenty miles. You had to be a house guest to use it. He bought several rounds of gin and tonics for my father as they sat on the verandah and looked down the shimmering stand of gum trees in the valley beyond.
‘My cobber bought me a couple of drinks,’ my father said, the first night after Frank came north. He giggled and sang. My cobber. These lapses into the vernacular, his way of saying he was a bloke’s bloke, sat uneasily inside his English voice, and it irritated my mother. As the ritual at the Homestead persisted over a week or two, it became more than the way he talked that annoyed her, it was something else I didn’t understand. She became increasingly silent.
‘His money’ll run out,’ she said.
‘He’s got a job,’ my father said, with triumph.
‘Picking lemons?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe you could get one too.’
My father looked alarmed. ‘My back would never stand it,’ he said.
‘Well, then, perhaps I could get a job picking,’ she said.
‘You’d never reach above the bottom branches,’ my father said, but he looked at her with renewed interest.
Frank came to dinner one evening soon after this. He’d moved into a packing shed on a neighbouring orchard, sleeping on a camp stretcher my father had found him. The gin and tonics had run out.
The room in which we ate was narrow, not more than six feet across by about fifteen long, a bench at one end and a coal range on one wall, our gate-legged table, oval when it was folded out, creating a barrier between the kitchen and the other end of the room, where a wooden-backed sofa stood. Seeing it like this, it is not a beautiful room, ugly in fact, its cream walls stained with smoke, red congoleum on the floor. But consider our table, laid with an Irish-linen cloth, heavy silver cutlery, the knives bone-handled, the plates willow pattern. This was my mother’s dowry, remnants of another life. The men wore their jackets with ties, my mother a short-sleeved satin sheath dress, in wide horizontal navy-blue and scarlet stripes, with a scooped neckline. I wore a cotton print dress sprinkled with mauve flowers, a gift from my grandmother; it had a Peter Pan collar and short puffed sleeves that ended in bands above my elbows. We were eating the last of the broiler chicken, which my mother had cooked in a slow casserole. But they drank wine, which Frank had brought, out of crystal glasses. Dally plonk, my father said, grinning. Sly grog, my mother retorted, looking at Frank from the corner of her eye.
‘I’ve come north,’ Frank said, obviously for her benefit, as he must have already said this to my father, ‘because I’m thinking about what to do now the war’s over. I don’t really want to be a farmer for the rest of my life. My family just took it for granted I’d settle back in Hunterville. But, you know, once you’ve been away and seen a bit of the world, you can’t just accept everything the way it was before.’
‘So, you just up and left?’ asked my mother.
He shrugged, opening his hands expressively, a surprising gesture, as if to explain how his time in Europe had altered him. ‘The cows are dry. It seemed like a good time to get away and sort things out and make a bit of extra money at the same time.’
‘You’ve got your rehab surely?’ This was a sore point with my mother. The rehabilitation money for the men who served in the war had got eaten up in this place when it might have gone into something more to her liking.
‘I needed someone to talk to,’ said Frank, looking at my father. ‘Someone who understood. I might go to university, one of the agricultural colleges, something like that.’
‘Good idea,’ my father said. ‘While you’re not tied down.’ And I thought he looked wistful.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be too tied down to find something for the pot tomorrow,’ my mother said. She was serving up pancakes drizzled with golden syrup for dessert.
‘Kill another chook,’ said my father.
‘We’ve only got four left. Don’t you want eggs for breakfast?’
My father looked alarmed.
‘I’ll pay some board next week,’ Frank said.
‘But you’re not boarding with us,’ my mother said. ‘You’re a guest.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind me coming over in the evenings, perhaps I could pay for my meals, a regular arrangement.’
‘Capital,’ said my father. I could see this conversation had been rehearsed.
My mother was a sensible woman. She knew that, if he paid her on a regular basis, she could make it stretch further than my father imagined. ‘Ten shillings a week.’
My father looked taken aback and was clearly going to argue for less when she quelled him with a look so sharp it could have cut glass.
‘First instalment next Friday all right then?’ Frank said.
When they had finished dinner, my father said, ‘I’ll walk Frank home.’
‘Surely he can find his own way now?’
‘It’s a nice night for a couple of fellas to have a walk and a smoke.’
And so it was, one of those starry nights in the north when, even in winter, it’s mild and the air holds the tang of citrus leaves and ripe lemons, and there is a great silence over the shallow hills and valleys. I saw their cigarettes glowing in the dark as they walked off down the road.
This arrangement was all very well, but Friday was still some days away, and so the paying guest had to be fed.
In the morning, my father said to me, ‘We’re going hunting, Mattie. Get your shoes on.’ He’d hardly spoken to me in weeks, not since Frank came. It was not an unfriendly silence, but he thought I should be a girl who sang and danced around. When he did notice me, he wanted to teach me songs, but I was not a singer and a dancer, I was a watcher.
The invitation to go shooting was really a command. We set off across the paddocks, him carrying a shotgun, me tagging along behind. It was still quite early in the morning, the spider webs spotted with dew, light fragmenting off them as the sun rose.
‘I miss the Old Dart,’ my father said suddenly, as I trailed along. ‘You wouldn’t imagine it, Mattie, all the people, the streets full of all sorts of them. Merchant bankers, barrow boys, tradesmen, butchers — my goodness, so much meat — and birds in cages hanging in the doorways of houses. There’re booksellers, artists, writers … I’m reading a book called The Purple Plain right now — it’s by a man called Bates. Perhaps you’re too young to be reading stuff like this, you’ll have to ask your mother. Music halls, dancers, poets — oh, my God, oh, to be in England now.’
‘What’s wrong with here?’
‘Nothing, dammit, nothing. Don’t you listen to a word I say?’
‘Well, if there’s nothing wrong with here, why do you want to be in England now?’
‘It’s a line of a
poem,’ he said almost sullenly. ‘And the nothing, that’s what’s wrong — the nothing of everything. The way people look at you because there’s nothing else to look at.’
‘Who looks at you?’ I mentally scanned my more recent forays into adult territory, trying to work out whether the watcher had been watched.
‘Nobody. Here, make yourself useful, learn to hold a gun at the very least.’ And he put the rifle in my hands and showed me how to hold it up to my shoulder, although the weight of it was almost too much for me to support. ‘Look, we’re out to get a pheasant or two for dinner.’
The sun was rising high, and in the golden glow of grass and light I saw something move and my finger squeezed the trigger. A feathered creature rose straight up from the ground and fell back. It was a soft brown hen pheasant. All of a sudden, I was a huntress and a poacher.
Sour fright filled my mouth. I don’t have much of a taste for death.
My mother plucked and gutted the two pheasants that we took home (my father shot the second one), her fingers carefully searching for shotgun pellets. She cooked them with rare brilliance, using some of the leftover wine from Frank’s visit, and told my father to go out and shoot some more.
Like Frank, my mother got work in the orchards, climbing ladders and picking oranges and lemons with sharp steady snaps of her secateurs. She earned one shilling and sixpence for every case, and she filled them at twice the rate Frank did. She and Frank began to show signs of a camaraderie that hadn’t been there before, although the banter was mostly of her making. ‘And how many boxes did you fill today?’ she would begin. ‘Ten, oh my, but then I noticed you picked the lower branches first.’ My mother, being small and light and fast, cleaned out the tops of the trees but it was harder work. After a while the orchardists began to pay her a bonus of sixpence a box. By and large it was my mother who paid the bills, while my father worked on our land. His face brightened on the days when she was free to work alongside him.
Sometime around the middle of last century, the climate began to change. I suppose it did everywhere, but the people in Alderton saw it as a sign that their luck had run out. The summers became drier, and droughts set in: in one year, whole orchards wilted and died. At a price, a trucking firm would deliver water, but, without natural rainfall, the settlers were at a loss. They ran hoses from taps, but as most of them relied on water stored in tanks from the winter rains, this soon disappeared, and they had only river water to drink. You could see them toiling up and down the banks of the creeks and river tributaries that meandered through their properties, carrying buckets and pots. Sometimes they just sat among the long grass and aromatic pennyroyal near the waterways, looking lost. We didn’t come here for this, you could hear them saying, if not aloud, in their hearts. A few packed up and left.
