The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  Jack had nineteen pounds and a diamond of one and a half carats from a claim he had staked. He sold the diamond to pay for the move to the coast. The Pullens had left with the blind haste of refugees.

  Little by little after the Metcalfe family settled in they began to realize what Diamond Head was really like. You are living in the same cage as something uncanny and of unearthly strength. It is not the loneliness, the wild storms, the feeling of being cut off from humanity. It is the sense that Diamond Head is waiting to break you. It waits. It uses a man’s own rush to throw him. It has tricks, not just to pick off some solitary fisherman from the rocks, but it seems to study out how to deal with men, find out their weaknesses.

  The Metcalfe weakness was that they fought among themselves. Jack went off to the war in 1914, leaving the place to Albert after a fierce quarrel. Ernie, the best-tempered of men, came to take Jack’s place, but he couldn’t stand Albert either. Ernie lived on the farm but worked on the railway which was struggling through the swamps and mountains along the North Coast, much beset with rain and treacherous ground.

  Ernie could have been a ganger because he had a marvellous eye for levels, but he preferred to be a navvy. (“The navvy is the gendeman of the working classes.”) As a ganger he would have been excluded from the easy friendship of his fellows. He would walk the few miles across the plains to the lake at Humbug Bay where the Twomeys had a cottage. The Twomeys also worked on the railway and they would take a boat up the river to die rail camp. In the evening they came back the same way after a hard day’s work and Ernie would often run the miles home to keep himself in training.

  But Albert was unkind to the horses and Ernie had always treated animals as friends. They would follow him about hoping for a word and he talked to them as though they were people. Albert wanted the horses to recognize him as master. So Ernie spoke plainly to Albert and left to join Jack in France.

  “I told him not to come,” Jack said. “I writ and said, This is a bastard of a place.’ It was about the time Hughes tried to bring in conscription and the officers wanted us to vote for it and we wouldn’t Be-the-gawd, didn’t they pay us out! We’d be so tired walking round a shell-hole we’d fall in.”

  When Ernie caught up with Jack he told his brother for the first time in his life he was right about something. It was a bastard of a place. Jack was in hospital badly gassed and Ernie, more lighdy gassed, overtook him there.

  “It was our own gas,” Jack explained. “Chlorine—phosgene. We sent it over, but the wind came up and blew it back. A good few died. Some blokes never even got their helmets on. They went sort of delirious.”

  A doctor had seen Jack at the back of the trenches and pronounced him dead. An orderly, by mistake, moved him to hospital where they said he would never get over it Then another doctor told him, “You’ll be able to swing the lead on this for six months.”

  After a few weeks in hospital he was back in the trenches and was wounded. He was two years in the trenches and shipped home, he said, a total wreck. When he was over eighty he felt that only coming of a long-lived family and drinking plenty of beer had preserved his life thus far.

  Ernie never complained. His good humour kept his mates cheerful and when the bullets came like bees swarming he went forward a little surprised but not afraid. He enjoyed what there was to enjoy, remembering especially a pretty French girl in a ruined town who thought as little of marriage as he did. Returned from the war completely unharmed, he took up a soldier-settlement block on the irrigation area near that river he had once braved in a frail canoe. He grew great golden apricots, built himself a neat house which he kept scrupulously clean. He played a good game of tennis after working at back-breaking labour in the orchard. It was not the drought that beat soldier-settlers but the flourishing condition of their orchards. You could not sell apricots. There were so many that it was not worth shipping them to market. The banks foreclosed on the farms, the soldiers were evicted and the farms were bought by men who made fortunes out of them. Ernie walked off his property saying that he was fish-hungry and he could do with some surfing. He came back to Diamond Head and fished and surfed until even he was exhausted. Then he had the inevitable row with Albert over the way he treated the horses and went off to Queensland.

  The one who missed Ernie most was Clara’s boy, Bert. Clara had a shop in a Sydney suburb and Bert came to Diamond Head for the holidays. In those days it was under cultivation, fields of corn and crops, cabbages, tomatoes, vineyards. They would kill a goat, salt it down, fish with plugs of dynamite in the holes under the cliff, get a chaff-bag full, and smoke the fish in a home-built smokehouse. The fish would come in on the high tide, and at the new moon there were two high tides close together and the fish, knowing this, would remain in the holes. Under the flare of the lights they would panic and rush for the ledges. You could scoop them out with your bare hands. And then—a great piece of luck for Bert—one holiday he broke his arm and had to stay at Diamond Head, missing a whole term. He had been playing with other boys at Harry Metcalfe’s farm and Bert was the wounded steer with horns tied on who rushed the other boys to gore them. He jumped at the fence, fell over it and broke his arm.

  He never did catch up on his schooling and made an ample fortune. His great dream was to get back to Diamond Head and it followed him all his life. He worshipped Ernie. Ernie told him that some day they would build a boat and sail around the islands. They would take the rifle. They would go off together roving and seeing strange places. But Ernie went off alone to Queensland and Bert had to go back to his mother’s shop.

  There were some mighty queer things doing at Diamond Head after The Mother died in 1933. Jack complained that Albert was doing everything against him and the town of Laurieton claimed that the brothers had a still. “There were eighteen gallons of honey-beer for a wedding,” Jack admitted. “And I said to Albert, There will be no more honey-beer made on these premises while I am here.’”

  Then there were the nine gallons of honey-beer at a sale up on the Moorlands road where people were bewildered to find they had bought horses when they couldn’t remember bidding for them, and Jack woke up with a lump on his head in the dairy where he slipped while carrying a demijohn. He didn’t come to properly until the following morning. This time it was Albert who left. He took his bees and joined a little colony of invalid pensioners living under the cliff at Point Perpendicular. Their children used to walk to school and Albert, whose manners were always courtly to the point of magnificence, used to come into town to the hotel. On the way he would jut his beautiful white moustache over the fence to advise me about my bees and he would always come in to help me rob them. I would slip him ten shillings for this and no man ever received this sum with a better grace.

  Clara had come up from Sydney when Jack was at Diamond Head on his own. She intended to pull the property together and she did. It was Clara who wrote the letter to Queensland telling of Jack’s bad heart and how he was not expected to live much longer.

  When Ernie came out of hospital differences developed between him and Jack, who expected Ernie to go in to Laurieton and sell farm produce from door to door.

  “He was a very conceited bugger,” Jack said later. “Him and Albert was always selfish. They hated selling anything. Give it away sooner. They’d go as far as the gate and invent any excuse to come back. Say they’d forgotten their tobaccer. Didn’t like to call at people’s doors and ask did they want anything.” Ernie always disliked shopkeepers, but not as much as he detested “bosses”. “You’d have thought selling was a crime. Always conceited and it made me damned wild.”

  Fewer and fewer people came to Diamond Head now that Uncle Johnny no longer held picnic races and the road was never repaired. Uncle Johnny had long ago given up Diamond Head as a bad job. “Too isolated,” he told us. “Nothing does well there.” Instead he let cottages in Laurieton where he could keep his eye on them. Uncle Johnny had a magnificent instinct for property.

  Clara might have r
emained at Diamond Head with Ernie if it had not been for the argument over the pig. Clara had decided to kill the pig for Christmas and she always got her own way in a sweet womanly fashion. Ernie made a great scene about it.

  “Go down and shoot my best friend!” He turned fiercely to a small red-headed great-nephew who was staying with them. “You’d better get inside before she wants me to shoot you, too!” He brooded over the murder of the pig in a way that Clara felt was quite unreasonable. Before she left she gave the best of the poultry to her daughter Dot because Ernie would only let them roost in the trees and be eaten by foxes.

  Clara went off to take care of her son Bert in Sydney and Ernie was left alone at Diamond Head.

  The two gentlemen-in-exile, Albert and Jack, would sometimes meet at the Laurieton hotel. They might be speaking or they might not.

  “I hear Ernie’s out there on his own,” Albert said to Jack, nursing a glass and gazing down the river.

  “Serve him right. Conceited cow. He’s no bloody good as a farmer.”

  “What’s he doing then?”

  “He’s draining the bloody lake.”

  “Well, that’ll kill him if Dimandead doesn’t. I reckon,” said Albert the philosopher, “that place is like a whopping great ant-lion. It waits for some silly ant to sit down near it and—snap!—it eats him. It’s ate us and it’ll eat Ernie.”

  “He always was a mad bugger,” Jack growled. At last they had found something they agreed on.

  Chapter VI

  ERNIE was just on the edge of his reputation as “the mad hermit of Dimandead”. When we first arrived I would see him trudging up from the punt in the rain, a sack over his shoulders, leading the horse with a cartload of cabbages. I would see him going home, the cabbages still unsold, the rain dripping off the brim of his wide felt hat. He came in to sell me a cabbage now and then. He was just a man with a beard who was related in some way to that courteous old Albert Metcalfe who was so good with bees.

  Then once when he came in with a cabbage I pointed out gently that I had a vegetable garden and was giving the vegetables away. He did not come again and I developed feelings of guilt. How mean can you be ? I could have bought his cabbage and fed it to the fowls. It was only sixpence. I used to look out hoping that he would stop, but he never did. He was, as Jack said, too proud.

  The endless procession of natives bearing gifts was wearing me down. If we went off for the week-end camping with the two horses we had bought, we would return to find a fisherman had walked into the kitchen and left a couple of fish on the kitchen table, a shy child had left a brown-paper bag of mushrooms. Someone had left a cake, a bucketful of crab legs.

  We never locked a door and, although the Laurietonians were supposed to be great thieves, in the eleven years nobody stole anything but my drake and that was taken by some American airmen who had crashed their flying-boat in the river. Who would steal books ? Or a typewriter ? To the older people reading for pleasure was sinful—a waste of time when you could be working. Dancing was sinful and led inevitably to sexual intercourse. The primitive Christians who had come through with the bullock waggons had left their mark.

  Farmers in the early days, burning down the great cedar forests and clearing “scrub” of valuable softwoods, had pondered on sin on their lonely farms. Their descendants never did become accustomed to my habit of talking to men. What was worse, my husband didn’t seem to mind that I went out on the snapper boats with two men, one of whom had six children. I could also be seen painting and puttying on the boat-slip where Eddie Dobson was building a snapper boat, and this was worse because Eddie Dobson was a married man with eight children. Eddie, who knew his Laurieton, decided to bring his wife, Dot, down from the farm to chaperon him, and Dot proved so useful that she stayed on.

  Eddie found that no more tools were stolen, accounts were kept, timber was delivered. Dot steered the snapper boat to Sydney through a howling gale towing a disabled timber boat while Eddie was seasick. Dot was so grateful to me that she always sent one of the children in with her special sweet biscuits.

  Roddy took the senior pupils out to Eddie Dobson’s farm behind the Big Brother so that Eddie could show them the rare softwoods that grew in the gullies. The school collection of timber samples soon rivalled that of a technical museum as the men from the timber mill took an interest and brought in specimens. The boys polished them, labelled them with the correct names and hung them on the wall. Eddie came in to lecture on these wood samples.

  “Those boys,” he said, “had me gallied. Maybe I was a little careless when they were all saying, out at the farm, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ but they’d gone back and looked all those wood chips up in a great thundering book on timbers. They had me on toast. ‘Why did you say it was rosewood ? The book says it isn’t.’ They kept me hopping.”

  When I gave Eddie a copy of the novel I wrote about Laurieton, Lost Haven, he read it aloud to his family at night sitting round the great open fireplace. “When I came to me own death,” he said, “the tears was running down me face and I couldn’t go on for crying.”

  It took some time for the parents to realize that the schoolmaster was teaching the children they must not kill the birds and animals. The first surprise had been that he did not cane the children, but this was excused because he “was bringing them on real well”. Then he announced that anybody shooting satin-birds within a mile of the school would have him to deal with. They were protected. When asked who was protecting them be said, “I am.” The area for a mile around the school was a bird sanctuary. He confiscated shanghais. And he became really ferocious when he came on two boys setting their dogs on a wombat, a slow, gentle animal. To the fishermen who shot swamp wallabies for bait in the fish-traps, and black swans to eat, who scraped the eggs from the female lobsters so that they could send them to market, this concern for animals and birds was comical.

  I asked old Pop Slocombe about the corkwood pigeons which local families made into pies. Half an hour after our conversation shots rang out in the street behind the school. Pop came in beaming with a rifle in his hand and a bunch of dangling birds in the other. “There you are,” he said generously. “Just enough to make a good pie.” And I had to pluck them and cook them. Without their feathers they were about the size of a sparrow.

  His daughters, Peg and Pat, became our great friends. Pat kept the hairdresser’s shop and had a devoted admirer, Hughie McCafferty, who was a Presbyterian while the Slocombes were one of the few Roman Catholic families in the town. Peg had no fixed admirer at the time and she came riding with us. She tended the Catholic church and was altar boy when no one else came. She said she had found the linoleum in the sanctuary was really cream with a pattern. Until she scrubbed it when the cleaner was away she had always thought it was brown.

  The Slocombes lived opposite the hotel which they had formerly leased and Peg’s mother, Selina, knew more about what went on in the town than anyone else. I used to sit on her front veranda with her and she told me stories of great banquets in bigger hotels. The Slocombes had retired, but Selina had a grievance about the way the family had been ousted from their lease and kept watch on the hotel as an enemy fortress. The house was immaculate and the garden so well tended by Pop that his papaws positively shone. He had a jabiru stork in the garden which was the terror of fruit-stealing boys. It died mysteriously. How would you poison a stork ? Its grieving owner put up a plaster stork by the bird-bath as a memorial. Pop Slocombe was a great adviser about horses and his tragedy was that when a flood came over the property he owned farther up the coast he had to stand on the upstairs veranda and watch his racehorses swimming around until they were drowned. I don’t think he ever quite recovered.

  We had bought two horses as the roads were too rough for a car and we could see the country on horseback. Creamy, Roddy’s horse, never took any notice of her rider. She would dawdle about while the other horses went on, then, finding herself alone, she would throw up her head with a scream like a pa
nic-stricken steam-engine and gallop off to rejoin her mates. Her rider clung on desperately. Coming home all the horses galloped—my brown Betty, Peg’s piebald Freckles, with fat Creamy in the lead. They knew there would be a hot mash and their coats on against the cold. Once while I was stirring the mash Creamy gently fastened her teeth in the seat of my riding pants. She could jump any fence and then undo the gate to let the other horses in.

  I would leap out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night with a cry, “The horses are in the garden”, and there they would be. Creamy staked herself jumping a six-foot fence and Pop Slocombe showed me how to swab the wound and apply Stockholm tar daily. Anyone who has had to tend a suppurating wound behind a horse’s foreleg until it heals will wonder why people ever keep horses. It is some kind of moral confidence trick horses have imposed on humanity. I had to rub them with kerosene for botflies. When Roddy was later taken to hospital with blood-poisoning and broke out in a mysterious rash at a time when doctors knew little about penicillin-allergy Pop Slocombe came up with an oozy, smelly grey mixture suitable for horses, and, sure enough, it cured the rash.

  Dick Bibby, another friend, brought the milk. He would come riding past the fence after milking his cows in the evening and I would run out with the billy so that he need not get off his horse. He would tell me cruel old tales of timber-getters and bullock-drivers, wheezing with laughter as he came to where someone was hurt. He was as old and hard as a fence-post, a man nothing could destroy, and we were very fond of him. He kept our horses on his property by the lake when we went on holidays.

  The horses were a great attraction at the school picnic when we went out past the Hope to a little lagoon by the pilot station. Every child had a ride along the beach at Point Perpendicular and everyone in the town who could came, whether they had children or not.

  When we first arrived the boys fought all the time until Roddy produced a couple of pairs of boxing gloves and insisted that no fight should be without gloves or a referee. They soon took the measure of each other and the fighting stopped while they concentrated on bronze medallions for life saving. They were all very charming children.