Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  THERE WERE SIX OF OUR immediate family at the table for that last Christmas, and numerous friends came in, and old Grandma Smith who had run away with a ship’s bosun so long ago and now, at ninety-five, could still remember the excitement of it. Grandmother lived with us and, being a canny Scots woman, was telling the relatives she always got a sixpence in the pudding, though threepence was the going rate. I was out in the scullery with my Mother. She had put a two-shilling piece in the pudding and now she carefully got it out and put it on Grandma’s plate. I said, ‘But there’s already a sixpence in there, Mum’ for a piece with sixpence had been put on the plate, but she told me to just take it in to Gran. So we were around the table having home-made Christmas pudding and cream and for a short time we overlooked Grandma until she suddenly said ‘Nothing! Not a thing!’ We all stared because the word had gone around that there wasn’t only a sixpence but also a two-shilling piece in her pudding. Mum said to me, ‘Run down quickly to Dr Trumpy’. He was the son of a doctor who Grandma Smith had often ridden with to attend childbirth cases in the bush, she being a well-known professional midwife (who always exacted payment for her labour like any good Scotswoman would do). The doctor came straight away, had a piece of Mum’s pudding, and kept asking Gran how she felt. ‘No good at all,’ Gran said. ‘There weren’t even a thrupence in it.’ Doctor left after a while, saying to Mum ‘If everyone had a constitution like Gran I’d be out of a job in no time.’

  It was the last time we celebrated Christmas in the old style. Many of our extended family were at the table for that Christmas. There would have been one more but Bob, my brother-in-law, had been notified he was to join a troop train in Melbourne and we didn’t see this brave young man again. But we were not to know the future, and the traditional celebrations were bright and happy. Bob had been on ‘final leave’, and he and my sister Kathleen had prepared the poultry from our chook house. For Christmas and New Year we would wring the necks of our chooks before we put them on the chopping block in the back yard. We would lop their heads off, then holding the chook by the feet, we dipped it in the tub of boiling water that could scald your hands if you were not nippy with the dipping in and hauling out, and pulled the feathers out. Then came the boring pulling out of the quills and we rubbed the now-naked chook with a sugar bag to clean it up, slit the vent, hand in, pulled the guts of the chook out, chopped off the feet and boiled them to get the thick skin off. The boiled flesh on poultry feet is delicious and gelatinous. You’ve never heard of anything so revolting? Perhaps not: we pay other people to do it for us these days.

  There were still some of our young cousins at home ready to go to the war, some were already there. John Buick was home on leave from the navy for a week, but Raymond was already in the Middle East and about to go ‘missing’ during the debacle of Greece. Sheila Adams was in the army driving a truck, the two Buick girls were waiting for their call-up to the airforce, and the two Jackson boys and the two Simpson boys were up in the islands, we didn’t know where. Most of the boys I’d known in Penshurst had gone before I left that little town to enlist.

  No, I don’t think we were any more patriotic than any other family (in fact, we as a family have none of that in us). What sent us to war was genteel poverty, lack of opportunity, and the never-ending grind of workingclass people – no matter how hard we tried to get along.

  * * *

  Being a ‘battler’ is, to Australians, akin to having some kind of courageous martyrdom swathed around you while you, the battler, beat your arms like wings to escape the invisible, cobweb chains that bind you. ‘Oh, she was a real battler’ we would say of my Mother – and this has been said often of Mum, even at her funeral, when discussing her never-ending labour. It meant not to ‘get on’ but merely to survive, to hold her family together, feed and clothe them decently, give them dignity while avoiding the do-gooders – those whose supposedly ‘good works’ were always repressing because of their firm belief in the social order of the rulers and the ruled. We, of course, never suffered from ‘do-gooders’, those who believed that sending the unwanted scraps left from their tables to the starving would find themselves on a pathway to heaven, or perhaps more importantly for them, election to the presidency of the local church guild or sometimes, merely the feeling of superiority when handing down an unwanted thing to another less fortunate.

  Mum had none of that in her. When she sent us kids off with a big billy of soup it was the real thing – a thick, gelatinous stock made with lots of shanks, meat covering the bones, split peas, as many vegetables as Dad grew and everything always fresh, never left-overs. ‘Tell her I made too much and if she doesn’t want it throw it out to her chooks’ she’d bid us as we set off down the road. Time after time we did this; sometimes it was cake, but mostly good nutritious stew or soup, and I recall that once it was hot cross buns made with yeast and I could smell the tempting odour all the way down to the woman with three little girls whose father was ‘on the wallaby’, as Dad described men who were tramping over the countryside looking for work – or escaping their responsibilities.

  Living in the bush, the country, outback, woop woop, whatever we called it, had limitations but there were consolations, or so we thought. The smells of a country store of that time have gone: the grain for chooks, and out the back of the shop the currants and sultanas laid out on a piece of wire netting to rid them of weevils, the broken biscuits sold cheap on the counter, wheat ground in a handmill for porridge had a warm delicate odour, nothing packaged, even the sugar weighed out in front of you and the willow pattern china you could get ‘free’ if you saved coupons from Robur tea.

  We had more pets – birds – than anyone I knew and all came to us after they had fallen naked to the ground when trees blew over in a storm or timber cutters rescued them. Mum mothered them by chewing grain and feeding them from mouth to beak. There was a white yellow-crested cockatoo, a Major Mitchell, a rosella, a ‘smoker’ (now called a Regent parrot) which a travelling priest gave me as well as a printed permit to keep this rare bird. They all lived to a great old age. Chu Chu, the pretty Major Mitchell, was perched on Mum’s shoulder one day, nestling her head beneath Mum’s curls. It was her favourite perch and she said ‘Poor Chu Chu’ – and the bird fell, dead. We mourned Chu Chu as the old friend she was. All these birds were free except on warm days when we wanted the doors open to catch any errant breeze and, of course, we children let the menagerie inside.

  ‘The beasts’ Mum would call them in a rage, when they used their razor-sharp beaks to chew the furniture, particularly the top of wooden chairs where they would perch like little old ladies and imitate our speech. The yellow-crested white cockatoo used to screech ‘You’ll get what for!’ – and we did. Baby possums were brought to us and once a baby lamb, still wobbling on its feet. Mum raised them all.

  A travelling show had a little pig but the owners couldn’t train it to do anything at all except squeal when it was fed, so it was left behind for us. We fattened it up in a sty made of railway sleepers, but it escaped before we could kill it for bacon. Mum accused Dad of purposely letting it escape as Dad was incapable not only of trying to kill a pig, but of hurting any living thing.

  We always had at least one cow, sometimes more, and had our own cream and butter and buttermilk for making scones and making our skin soft (well, that’s what we believed!). The yellow-crested cockatoo and the Major Mitchell, Chu Chu, would delicately nibble the froth from the top of the separated milk after we had removed the cream. The smoker and the rosella didn’t go for that at all, and they didn’t sit on the back of Billy, our white horse. But Chu Chu and Cocky did. When they heard Billy neighing with pleasure when Dad took bran and bread to him, they’d bustle off and share the spoils and when that was done they’d sit on Billy’s back and pick and crack in their sharp bills: ‘goodness only knows what!’ as Mum said disapprovingly.

  Like many another child, I keep memories of my Mother, not because I want to so much as because I have to: they a
re there. One memory that comes back to me is when, in later years, I drove her to a bush school back of Drouin where she and her brothers and sisters had gone to school at the close of the last century. She had told me how her father and the fathers of other children there had built the school themselves and the pieces of timber that were left over were given to the children to write on before they were able to buy slates.

  This day, when the chairman of the organisation began to read out the names of early pupils of that school dating back to the nineteenth century, Mum startled me. Of course there weren’t many people there who had attended that school in the early days, but as they called out the names of Jack Adams and Steve Adams, my mother answered for her dead brothers in Gallipoli in a clear voice: ‘Present, sir.’ And everyone later said ‘She said it just as they would have done.’ Mum looked almost joyous, as if she were back in those days when going to school was a very long hike, and the children would be met by their parents with fern hooks to cut their way back to their home by a different route each day, in the attempt to rid the land of the clotted crowd of bracken in that area.

  * * *

  Dad’s family were tall men, almost all above six feet and big withal, except for Dad – the baby of thirteen children, he was only five feet ten inches. The women were all tall, big-boned Scots women. Aunt Isabella – Belle or Bella to the immediate family only – was five feet ten inches, straight as an iron post and gentle as a flower. In those days, we spoke of adults as aunt, grandfather, mister and missus, but never by their Christian names (or ‘given names’ as we now more aptly say).

  Bella had ‘married into’ the Christadelphian religion. Her husband, George, who was dead before I was born, was one of the breakaways from a larger religion because their studies had shown them another way, one that they believed was the true path to whatever end they believed was theirs. Aunt Bella, coming from the pleasantly uninterested-in-religion Adam-Smith family, followed her man to the new faith and lived in it to her death.

  They built on Phillip Island in Westernport Bay and, here in the tiny front room, they had shelves of books, all dealing with religion, and I could go in there at any time to sit and read, a thing I couldn’t do at home as we had no books. The subject matter didn’t interest me much, but the beautiful use of language, the choice of words, phrases and sentences was exposed, and I submerged. On a separate shelf I came on a collection of simple little privately printed books, all, of course, in religious vein. The goodness of these people was manifest in their works. One story of Gippsland adherents to the faith told of waiting in the wilderness for their preacher to arrive, a man they called their Brother. They had no church but were all gathered out in the open under the gum trees, and they heard their Brother riding through the ancient forest, singing as he came, ‘… the Good Book in one hand, his horses reins in the other’.

  The sincerity conjured up set me thinking about how many of us were wondering what and how and why we got here and do we go on to anywhere? But there came no answer. This aunt and uncle had no such problems, they never doubted. Sophistication, simplicity or intellect told me nothing that could solve the riddle, and I wasn’t a being who could see or even imagine heavenly visions. Heaven was here and now. It may all have been so different if I could have seen – something.

  In most ways this was a different household and ambience from any I had known. This family was very poor, the grey four-roomed square wooden cottage had no verandahs, no paint anywhere, not ever, bare wooden scrubbed floors, ‘scrim’ walls – newspaper stuck on to hessian were the room dividers. When aunt was dying the doctor came out from Cowes and he read the walls while Mum made him a cup of tea. ‘Murder, love, despair, they’re all here’ he said. There was an outside washhouse where the horse harness hung, and where was kept the tin hip-bath that was carried into the kitchen on Saturday evenings. When we were visiting we took turns washing one another’s back.

  The lavatory was, according to my sister Kathleen, a bloody mile away, and we always formed a party to trek off with the lantern through the nights that seemed so dark and spooky with the koalas, that were in great numbers on the island, either grunting and thumping and roaring in their ever-sexy uproarious nights or crying so badly they sounded like babes lost in the bush. Indeed, first-time visitors would wake aunt through the night, insisting that a baby had been abandoned in the tree-filled bush. Some years later Dad and Mum moved the lavatory nearer the house, after filling in the six-foot hole at the old site. They dug a new hole for the wooden-paling sentry box to sit over. Dad christened it Parliament House and the name stuck, even aunt smiling gently at the title.

  My parents later bought this property and ran the tiny, uneconomic dairy farm that was up the hill. Mum had this farm when I came home from the war. I loved it. She had always wanted to get back to the farming life she had been born into, and this wee, grey wooden cottage suited her well. My eye can still flash back to the charm of watching her wandering, in one of her always-bright dresses, down among the myriad flowers, shrubs and trees to the Hakea Arbour – and I swiftly stencilled on my memory that title which seemed so exotic.

  The arbour consisted of five hakeas, all in deep bloom and carpeting the ground beneath. There was an unintentionally rustic seat made from one slab of wood resting on two tree trunks. There was always a running fight between sitters and growth or, as Dad said, ‘Turn your back and more trees will sprout on that seat.’

  But the truly unforgettable thing was the whole garden. There had once been long fences down either side and the back of the house, the fourth side being the waters of the bay. But the fences were no longer in view, hidden as they were in eight-feet deep walls of flowers, trees, shrubs, fruit trees and creepers. A memory remains of Kathleen and me, when we were children, crawling in under these great hedges, lying upside down and eating the white-fleshed peaches and the plums that had got to be part of this ‘fence’. We’d scrabble in anywhere along its length and disappear among the wonderland that Aunt Bella called ‘God’s Benison’; the words sang in my head.

  The purple buddleias were mixed up with blue plumbago and white lilac, lemon-scented verbena, herbs, red cherries, and white berries I never heard called by any name. Standing beside me one day Mum casually whispered the names of almost seventy varieties of flowers. In that garden all fought for recognition and they all won.

  This richness had not come only by way of cuttings and roots from friends. When I was a little girl Aunt Bella told me she and her Sisters and Brothers (whom I understood to be the friends in her faith) did not use artificial fertilisers or sprays. Indeed, nothing could be called artificial in this woman’s home, but she and her Sisters believed in ‘propagating the beautiful gifts God gave us’. Thus they sought to give beautiful gifts to the earth. This house and the land had been named ‘Ahava’, a place of great peace, we were told, according to the Old Testament, and the nameplate of ‘Ahava’ was given to me later and is fixed on my own housefront.

  The Duchess and Kathleen

  BEFORE I WENT TO THE war I had travelled widely in the State of Victoria with my parents, living in tiny, isolated railway settlements. I was sometimes called ‘the Duchess’ by my parents.

  The Duchess spent her childhood trying not to offend, to be invisible, which is tough when she was born an extrovert. Moving to a new settlement and unknown settlers and schools, with old feuds, habits and standards that were always unknown to us on arrival, was always a tense time. Of course, when Kathleen was still at school I had the world champion boxer-wrestler of all time at my side for protection, but with her being seven years older than me, and the school leaving age being fourteen, I did not enjoy her patronage for long. And being small I was unable to emulate her prowess in the ring.

  Whenever I used a word not common in our surrounds, repeated some story I had thought beautiful, made a gesture with my hands or body, or admired anything that children in their ken did not do, my act was aped and the cry rang out: ‘Oh! Hark at the Duc
hess!’ To counter this I learnt slang and swearing and cursing, and had a repertoire that few country people to this day could enlarge on. Because of this ‘bold’ talk, as Mum called it, I was in trouble at home, and at the little schools I became feared because of my quick, sharp tongue which was the only weapon available to me.

  The Duchess did try not to offend, not to be an extrovert, not to put forward solutions to anything until someone else stepped forward and then she could often manage, without stepping on anyone’s toes, to proffer an easier or better way to approach a problem, even if it were only the words of a certain song. And that behaviour is real tough if you are a bouncy person. And I was: a ‘goer’ as the saying went. At little country schools I planned concerts and wrote programmes which included dances, songs, recitations, group and solo performances and poetry readings, and coaxed the teacher to allow us to present these entertainments in the school.

  These ‘concerts’ must have been appalling. I can’t remember anything about those at school, but I do remember one of my ‘concerts’ at our house which, at that time, was right on the railway platform at Monomeith. I drove our milking cow in through the side gate, singing:

  Why has a cow got four legs?

  I really don’t know how,

  I don’t know, and you don’t know,

  And neither does the cow!

  and by this time I had driven the milker out the back gate and later returned for my bow. I guess this was probably the standard set in my irregular eruptions of art. Mick Yates from Caldermeade railway station was often hauled in to perform in my plays when his mother, a station mistress, was visiting my station-mistress Mother. The ladies hopped on and off trains as if they were taking taxi rides in the cities! I could never get Kathleen to join my act and she has not been to a theatre, ballet or opera to this day and lives perfectly happily without such frills in her life.