Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Over at the store we handed over our bottles and papers and while we were waiting for Mr Fowler, the shop assistant, who was the father of our friend Dorothy, to weigh up our bacon, the manager, who had been playing cards at our house the night before, came by, looked at us, then said, ‘You want to give the gentlemen of the open road a fair crack of the whip, Bill. It’s a hard row they hoe.’ We were very pleased to have this proof of the success of our impersonation. With the 1s 11/2d we were given we bought bacon, two chocolate bars and two penny aniseed balls that would last all day.

  For a while we squatted beside the railway gates watching the wheat wagons go by, and then we set off to light a fire and boil our billy. Mr Tweddle, the wheat-farmer, came down as we were about to begin our meal. We heard him coming, galloping hell for leather down the side of his paddock of ripe wheat, heading for where we had our fire blazing beside the dam.

  ‘Hey! You!’ he yelled when he was still at a distance. We stood up. He reined in his horse a little then and broke down to a canter, shading his eyes to see us the better. When he came up to us he said, ‘Well, well, and how are you two blokes going, eh?’ Perspiration was running down his face and he took out a handkerchief and mopped it off. ‘You gave me one devil of a scare when I saw that fire going so close to the wheat. You know how it is, one spark and the whole crop would go, ripe and dry as it is.’ We began to worry. Our faces must have shown this. Mr Tweddle quickly went on, ‘But of course I didn’t know it was two old hands at the game down here. It could have been two new-chums who didn’t know how to take care of a fire in these parts.’ We cheered a little at this further proof of the effectiveness of our disguise.

  ‘But you two – I’d stake my life on it that you were just going to carry water from the dam now your billy’s boiling. You were going to put your fire out.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ we said. ‘That’s what we were going to do.’ We doused the fire.

  As Mr Tweddle rode away he called back to us, ‘Good luck and a dry bed, mates,’ and waved his whip to us.

  We looked with glee at one another. He didn’t know us either! No one recognised us! When the goods train came in we walked over to the station and asked the engine-driver for some hot water for our billy.

  ‘It’s not safe to light a fire in these parts,’ we told him solemnly.

  While we were walking back to the goods shed to brew our tea we passed the guard, who was uncoupling wheat trucks. Out of habit I grabbed the hose-like coupling as it swung free and, putting it to my lips, spoke into it as into a telephone. Sylvia dropped her swag and capered up to the other end of the truck and did likewise. The guard stopped his work to look at us. Realising this was hardly in character we dropped the toy and shambled off as swaggies do, sure that our momentary lapse was not enough to give the game away.

  I didn’t ask till I was much older who had told on us. Someone certainly had. A week after our adventure Mum waited for me with the razor strop when I came in from school. (The engine-driver it was, laughingly telling of the great amusement caused all round by a little girl dressed up as a swagman, unaware that he was getting me the strop.)

  THE SWAMPLANDS

  Of course we didn’t stay at Waaia too long. After two years Mum had itchy feet.

  ‘You want to get on the wallaby, Birdie?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Is there anything going?’ There was never any difficulty in getting a transfer. The foot-loose fettler and the station-master with wanderlust moved from one area to another and ‘the Heads’ knew they took with them new methods of work and, as well, injected an impetus and social vigour into isolated outposts stagnating in the wet blanket of the Depression.

  In his work the railwayman built up a tradition of service that only he and his immediate community knew of. It was a tradition that was born of a complete sense of being part of a great movement. ‘The Great Family of Railway Workers’ Harold Clapp called them (and they, in their turn, called him the greatest transport man Australia had known).

  ‘Is there anything going?’

  There was a small caretaker-and-fettler station vacancy in Gippsland and within three weeks we were there. Waaia put on a farewell for us at the hall and old Bill Leaf made a speech and had a final waltz with me, and Mum and Dad were presented with a travelling rug. It didn’t seem real to be leaving. Other places were different; Waaia was truly home. I think all of us there knew we’d surely be back.

  Monomeith was in the Kooweerup swamplands, a flat area cut across by canals that drained the former wastelands of their water. Now it was a lush dairying land, although there were patches, such as one near our house, of rank swamp left where snakes abounded. Nip enjoyed this. He was a great snake-catcher and rarely a week went by that he didn’t bring one home.

  Monomeith had no pub, no shop, nothing but us. The railway station was post office too, as it had been at Nowingi. There were several big properties nearby. The nearest was Paddy Einsedel’s racing stud. Here the old man, who raised such stake-winners as Waltzing Lily and Black Alec, had a station-homestead type of establishment and a big garage in which he had three cars, two stuffed crocodiles, snakes in bottles, hundreds of odd exhibits, and many etchings and cartoons. It was one of the finest private bizarre museums.

  This line was a busy one, but not many of the trains stopped at our station; most of them went to the coal town of Wonthaggi direct, not stopping at any of the little stations in between. Our house was up on the platform itself and in the nights when you were in bed you could feel the crunch, crunch, crunch of the passing trains like nailed boots walking across your bedroom floor. I soon learnt to distinguish full trucks from empty ones, and the different kinds of wagons, coal trucks, cattle trucks and passenger coaches.

  ‘There was something wrong with the early train going up this morning,’ I told my father at breakfast one day. ‘It seemed unfinished.’

  That night Dad told me he had spoken to the driver on his return trip and told him what I’d said.

  ‘We’d coupled a flat-top behind the guard’s van to shunt off at Caldermeade,’ the driver had said. ‘Therefore she couldn’t "get" the van and the train would sound incomplete.’ I certainly knew my trains.

  Sometimes a train would pull up and shunt trucks into our siding; then you would see tarpaulins lift and heads pop out while men ‘jumping the rattler’ looking for work tried to get their bearings. If they saw us kids looking they’d put their fingers to their lips conspiratorially and disappear back under the tarp. Dad knew we knew of this illegal traffic. He said, ‘Try not to see it, but try not to forget it when you have full and plenty.’

  One day the train pulled up and they weren’t shunting. Lying awake in my bed I couldn’t work out what they were doing. I got up and looked out the window. A man was walking along the platform forcing the guard to undo the lashings holding the tarps down. He was after the illegal passengers, but as fast as he climbed in one side of a truck men sprang over the other side and sprinted into the low, wet, swampy scrub and disappeared. The guard did no more than he was ordered to do by the ‘head’. I thought at first that the men were negroes: they were all black from travelling in the coal trucks.

  Suddenly one of the men was trapped. He hadn’t been able to squeeze out the other side and had jumped onto the platform. The ‘head’ had his back to him trying to hustle the guard in his task. The guard looked up and saw the man as he jumped. He would be unable to get away because the gates to this platform were locked each night. The guard quickly motioned with his head towards our house gate and as he looked up saw my face at the window. The man ran in the gate through our rose garden and round the back of the house. When the ‘head’ gave up and went back to the van, the guard motioned me to put the window up.

  ‘Tell your dad,’ he said softly, nodding towards the back of the house.

  At Monomeith I went to school by train each day to the next ‘town’, Caldermeade, travelling free in the guard’s van. This day I was told by the guard that I was to travel
in the passenger coach, and as I stepped in I saw a figure bolt from our gate into the van. He looked like Dad; he was dressed in clothes very like Dad’s old suit, which I never saw after that day . . . Strange times when a man who could have been one’s own father was on the run because he’d committed the crime of not being able to find a job.

  On Melbourne Cup day the gang would work near the station so they could listen to the broadcast of the great race. On our first Cup day at Monomeith the goods train pulled in just before 3 p.m. and the driver, seeing the trikes pulled off the side of the track, came in to listen too, beckoning the guard after him. Dad saw a tarpaulin on a truck lift up a little so he opened the windows and the door wide and turned the great trumpet towards the train to enable the men on the ‘rattler’ to hear too.

  When we first moved to Monomeith we went to school there, a tiny square room a mile from our place. It had a total of eight pupils when Mick and I were mustered. It had survived only because the Railways Department had told the Education Department they were going to send a couple with children to the station. Mickie was sixteen and didn’t want to go to school. One day as we got to the school gate she just went on walking.

  ‘Don’t say anything to anyone till tonight,’ she warned me. All day I sweated it out. When I got home at 4 p.m. after giving her seven hours’ start Mum said, ‘Where’s your sister?’

  ‘Walking.’

  Mum had to move quickly. She didn’t know what Mick had in mind except she did know that she hated school. Mum, who I’d seen meet many a crisis calmly, tried to meet this one in the same way, but she was bewildered and tears welled in her eyes. Then the phone rang. Mick had turned up at Auntie May’s farm eleven miles away at Nar Nar Goon.

  This had the effect of ending Mick’s school days, which was what Mick intended, but it also ended Monomeith school’s days, for now, with only seven pupils, the school had to close. I would travel to Caldermeade station by train then walk a mile along the road to Caldermeade school between sweet hedges of may. At night I must walk all the way home for there was no suitable train, but sometimes as I’d plod along beside the ‘five-foot’ gauge an unscheduled goods train would pull up and I’d be hauled up on the footplate or into the guard’s van and given the run of the crib tins while we rattled homewards. On one memorable occasion the Commissioner’s car actually pulled up and took me home. This vehicle was an ordinary car with the rubber tyres replaced by flanged steel wheels and with the steering wheel removed. It was used by ‘heads’ only. It gave Mum, as she later declared, ‘quite a turn’ to see the Commissioner’s car pulling up unexpectedly at her station and then to see Harold Clapp himself handing her child up onto the platform.

  Smoothing down her starched apron with the Dolly Varden needlework she watched the Dodge disappear. ‘You didn’t say anything did you . . .’ – not really a question; she knew her daughter too well to think she would keep quiet if asked to speak. It was more like a cry from the dark depths of her being. ‘You didn’t say anything!’ Oh no, I assured her, I’d said nothing. It was Mr Clapp and the other gentlemen who talked, and when I answered it seemed to delight them so I carried on, making quite an impression on them. They laughed and laughed. They even asked the chauffeur to slow down the motor so we would have more time to talk and he laughed too.

  ‘Do you still go to Mass on the Casey as you did at Waaia?’

  ‘Oh no! We don’t have Caseys here.’ I lectured the Commissioners on the reasons why we didn’t have a motor.

  ‘We have pull-trikes here so we can hear the trains coming. But there aren’t many trains on Sundays.’ And what about Saturday night outings? Surely we visit the other railway families along the line? ‘All railway families visit on Saturday night,’ His Nibs said to me.

  ‘Oh yes, but we take the quad then, not the pull-quad but the pump-quad with the iron bars like crowbars to pump the wheels with, and do you know we had an awful accident last Saturday night and Mum says those jolly things shouldn’t be allowed and were enough to kill a body.’ Mr Clapp said, ‘Really! Are they?’

  ‘Oh yes. Mum and Dad were standing up pushing the iron bars up and down and Mick – she’s my sister . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Clapp. ‘I remember Mick.’

  ‘Well, we were sitting on the flat-quad and someone, Mum says it wasn’t her, put the bar into the wheel-turning-slot at the wrong time and over we went.’

  ‘Where? Over where?’

  ‘Over the bridge. Down into the canal. Of course it’s dry now in summer.’

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘Yes, Mum was sort of unconscious for a while and then Dad got her and us kids back up onto the bridge and we all lifted the trike – by Jove those quads are heavy blooming things [Dad’s words] – back onto the line and off we went to Caldermeade to the Yates’s to play crib.’

  ‘And Mrs Yates looked after your mother?’

  ‘Oh no. We couldn’t tell them what happened because there were strangers there and we never talk railway business to outsiders.’ Yes, I let him know I knew our duty as a railway family.

  ‘May all the saints in heaven help us,’ cried Mum, looking up to the sky for a sign.

  When Dad came home he said it didn’t matter. ‘There is a saying among railwaymen that the man who hasn’t broken a rule is the man out looking for a job.’ Mr Clapp knew this, Dad said, like any good employer would. ‘He knows we work hard and well and we’re loyal.’

  That was my first experience of going over a bridge. I soon repeated it. We used to walk two miles in the other direction to Kooweerup to Mass, and one Sunday coming home, when Mick and I were well ahead of our parents, I showed off, demonstrating how I could walk the parapet of a bridge.

  ‘Garn!’ said Mick. ‘That’s nothing. I bet you can’t run.’

  As I opened my eyes I could dimly see Mick bending over me. One leg was twisted strangely beneath me and my thumb hung at right angles to my hand. Mick dragged me from the canal bed up onto the railway track, but I couldn’t get my left foot to the ground. It was many months before I walked on it again and some years before I got out of the boots needed to strengthen the ankle. For much of the damage old Dr Appleford at Lang Lang blamed the liberal application of iodine my mother had put on.

  ‘Iodine has caused more crippled children than any other common medical aid in this country,’ the old man said. At that time iodine was considered almost a cure-all by bush people.

  ‘It prevents the bruise coming out,’ the doctor said. To counteract this he ordered that my foot remain higher than my hip until the bruise did come out. This was very trying. For a week the leg looked pasty, then it looked a little puffed-up and blue. Within a month the whole leg from toe to hip was mottled blue-purple-black, and I’d gaze at it in wonder propped up beside me as I practised the piano.

  I was studying for a music exam and when the time came Mum carried me from the train in Melbourne to the tram and from there into the Conservatorium. In those months she carried me many miles, and I was no longer small for my age; instead I was a fat, roly-poly child. Once she carried me two miles to have me inoculated against diphtheria.

  I was still unable to walk, but I could get my foot to the ground when the great floods of 1936 came to the Gippsland swamplands. All day, all night and all the next day and night the rain emptied out onto the swamps. The canals were running a banker. Then disaster came. The canals carrying water out to the sea met with a high tide coming in, and back over the land ran the water carrying the canal banks with it. Many people in Gippsland swear to this day it was a tidal wave; they had never seen the tide so high.

  On that second night of rain, just after we had gone to bed, there came a knocking on our front door.

  ‘Albert! The canal’s giving way. Come and lend a hand.’ This was the canal nearest to us. Dad didn’t come home for four days. All night they battled, lugged sand-bags and shovelled up rubble into holes in the banks. Then, led by their ganger, the gang went in to give a hand to
the people who were trapped in their homes.

  At home we were perfectly safe because of the house being off the ground up on the platform. We always had good stocks of food in our cupboards. On the second day Mum heard on the radio that homeless people were being brought in to the railway station at Kooweerup. She walked in to help. Where she walked on the five-foot gauge the swirling waters lapped over her shoes, the ballast had been swept away and the sleepers were held up only because they were fastened to the rails. The whole line in parts was swinging. Crossing the bridge over which I had fallen to the canal below when it was dry she was ankle-deep in water. As she paddled along from sleeper to sleeper down the track where it crosses the main street of Kooweerup she waved to friends of ours who were rowing up the main street after being rescued from their roof-tops.

  Dad and the other fettlers brought in scores of people who had been cut off on high ground or in the ceilings of their homes. At one house where the owners had desperately tried to protect their home by sealing up the windows and doors the whole house was spinning round in the raging waters. The water had run over the land so suddenly that most people were taken unawares. The Bush Nursing Hospital was caught this way. The fettlers cut through the roof of that building to take out the patients, several of whom were elderly and in a state of shock. Mum, helping patients out of the boat when it reached the Kooweerup station, found Dad’s coat round an old lady who had only a thin nightdress beneath it; an old man had lost his pyjamas and was wrapped in a blanket. The gang carried several people into the waiting room, now being used as a first-aid post.