by Nevil Shute
“Why, a poddy’s a cleanskin, a calf born since the last muster that hasn’t been branded. Some of these jokers, even your best friends, they’ll come on to your station and round up the poddys and drive them off on to their own land, and then there’s nothing to say they’re yours. That’s poddy-dodging, that is. It’s a fair cow. Of course, there’s always cattle crossing the boundaries because there aren’t any fences, so it’s a bit of a mix-up generally when you come to muster. But I’ve been on stations where there weren’t hardly any poddys there at all when we come to muster. All the jokers on the other stations had got them.”
She said, “But do the poddys just stay on the new land? Don’t they want to go back to mother?”
He glanced at her, appreciating the question. “That’s right — they would if you let them. They’d go straight back to their own herd on their own land, even if it was fifty miles. But what these jokers do is this. They build a little corral on their land in some place where no one wouldn’t ever think to look, and they drive your poddys into it. Then they leave them there for four or five days without food or water — don’t give them nothing at all. Well, if you do that to a poddy he goes sort of silly and forgets about the herd, and mother. All he wants is a drink of water, same as you or I. Then you let him out and let him drink his fill at a water-hole. He’s had such a thirst he won’t leave that water-hole for months. He forgets all about his own place, and just stays in his new home.”
Her eyes closed, and she slept. When she woke up the sun was lower in the sky, and Joe had left her. She got up and sponged her face in the bathroom, and saw him outside working on the engine of the truck. She tidied herself up, looked at her watch, and went to investigate the kitchen.
Primitive was the word, she thought. There was a wood-burning hearth which mercifully was out, and a wick-burning oil stove; this was the cooking equipment. There was a small kerosene refrigerator. Masses of cooked meat were stored in a wire gauze meat-safe with nearly as many flies inside it as there were outside. The utensils were old-fashioned and dirty and few in number; it was a nightmare of a kitchen. Jean felt that the right course would be to burn it down and start again, and she wondered if this could be done without burning down the house as well. There was little in the store cupboard but staple foods such as flour and salt and soap.
She put on a kettle to boil for tea and looked around for something to cook, other than meat. Eggs were plentiful at Midhurst and she found some stale cheese; she went and consulted Joe, and then came back and made him a cheese omelette with eight eggs. He cleaned his hands and came and watched her while she did it. “Oh my word,” he said. “Where did you learn cooking?”
“In Ealing,” she said, and it all seemed very far away; the grey skies, the big red buses, and the clamour of the Underground. “I had a sort of little kitchenette with an electric cooker. I always used to cook myself a two-course evening meal.”
He grinned awkwardly. “Afraid you won’t find many electric cookers in the outback.”
She touched his hand. “I know that, Joe. But there are lots of things that could be done here to make it a bit easier.” As they ate their tea they talked about the kitchen and the house. “It’s just the kitchen that needs altering,” she said. “The rest of it is lovely.”
“I’ll get a toilet fixed up in the house before you come,” he promised her. “It’s all right for me going out there, but it’s not nice for you.”
She laughed. “I don’t mind that, so long as you keep up the supplies of the Saturday Evening Post.” He grinned, but she found him set upon this alteration. “Some places have a septic tank and everything,” he said. “They put one in at Augustus when the Duke and Duchess stayed there. I reckon that we’ll have to wait a while for that.”
They ate their tea out on the veranda as the sun went down, and sat looking out over the creek and the bush, smoking and talking quietly. “What are you doing next week?” she asked. “Will you be in town, Joe?”
He nodded. “I’ll be in on Thursday, or Friday at the latest. I’m going up to the top end tomorrow for a couple of days, just to see what’s going on.”
She smiled. “Looking after the poddys?”
He grinned. “That’s right. It’s a bit difficult this time of year, in the dry, because the tracks don’t show so good. I got a boy called Nugget on the station now, and he’s a bonza tracker, oh my word. I’m taking him up with me. I’ve got a kind of feeling that Don Curtis, up on Windermere station, he’s been at my poddys.”
“What would you do if you found tracks, then, Joe? Tracks leading off your land and on to his?”
He grinned. “Go after ’em and find ’em and drive ’em back,” he said. “Hope Don doesn’t come along while we’re doing it.”
He drove her into Willstown at about nine o’clock that night; they halted for a while outside the town to say good-night in proper style. She lay against his shoulder with his arm around her, listening to the noises of the bush, the croaking of the frogs, the sound of crickets, and the crying of a night bird. “It’s a lovely place you live in, Joe,” she said. “It just wants a new kitchen, that’s all. Don’t ever worry about me not liking it.”
He kissed her. “It’ll be all ready for you when you come.”
“April,” she said. “Early in April, Joe.”
She started up the shoe workshop in the first week of December, three or four days after Aggie Topp arrived. To start with she had five girls, Judy Small and her friend Lois Strang, and Annie, whose figure was beginning to deteriorate and who had been sacked from the hotel, and two fifteen-year-olds who had recently left school. For cleanliness and to mark the fact that they were working in a regular job she put everyone into a green overall coat in the workshop, and gave them a mirror on the wall so that they could see what they looked like.
From the first days she found that the fifteen-year-olds were the best employees. Girls straight from school were used to the discipline of regular hours of work; she seldom got the girls from outback homes to settle down to it so well as the younger ones. The monotony was irksome to the older girls who had left school for some years, or who had never been to school at all. She tried to help them by ordering an automatic changing gramophone from Cairns, with a supply of records; the music certainly intrigued and amused the whole of Willstown and may have helped the older girls a little, but not much. The big attraction of the workshop was the air-conditioner.
The air-conditioner was the best recruiting agent of the lot. In that torrid summer heat which ranged between a hundred and a hundred and ten degrees at midday, she managed to keep the temperature of the workshop down to about seventy degrees, at which the girls could work without their hands sweating. For the girls it meant that they got respite from the heat of the day, and music to listen to, and the novelty of a clean green overall to wear, and money in their pockets at the end of the week. The workshop was popular from the first, and Jean never had any difficulty in getting as many recruits for it as she could handle. For the early months, however, she was content with five.
She spent a hectic fortnight after the workshop opened getting the ice-cream parlour furnished and stocked. She was resolved to have this open by Christmas Day, and she achieved her aim by opening on December 20th. On Joe’s advice she only opened half of it at first, leaving the parlour for the Abos till it was established that they wanted ice-cream. This saved her the wages of a coloured girl and the expense of furnishing. In fact, it was not for nearly a year that the demand arose and Abo ringers started hanging round the kitchen door to buy an ice-cream soda. She opened the coloured annexe in the following September.
She stood with Joe outside in the blazing sunlit street on that first afternoon, looking at what she had done. The workshop and the ice-cream parlour stood more or less side by side on the main street. The windows of the workshop were closed to keep the cool air in, but they could hear the girls singing as they worked over the shoes. Christmas was near, and they were singing
carols— “Holy Night,” and “Good King Wenceslas,” and “See Amid the Winter Snow.” The shirt was sticking to Jean’s back and she shifted her shoulders to get a little air inside. “Well, there it all is,” she said. “Now we’ve got to see if we can make it pay.”
“Come on and I’ll buy you a soda,” he said. “That’ll help.” They went in and bought a soda from Rose Sawyer behind the counter. “This part of it’ll pay,” he said. “I don’t know about the shoes, but this should do all right. I was talking to George Connor up at the hotel. He’s getting very worried about his bar, with you starting up.”
“I don’t see why he’s got anything to worry about,” she said. “I’m not going to sell beer.”
“You’re going to sell drinks to ringers,” he remarked. “If you had a bar instead of this, wouldn’t it rile you?”
She laughed. “I suppose it would. I can’t see myself putting the bar out of business, Joe.”
“I can see you doing all right, all the same.” As they sat at the little chromium glass-topped table, Pete Fletcher came in shyly and sidled up to the bar and ordered an ice-cream, and began chatting with Rose Sawyer. Joe said, “Poor old George Connor.” They laughed together, and then he said, “I bet you don’t keep Rose six months.”
Jean had seen a good deal of Rose Sawyer in the last month. “I’ll take you,” she said. “Bet you a quid she’s still there in a year from now, Joe.” They shook hands on it according to the custom of the place. “If she is,” he said, “it’ll be a miracle.”
Now that the businesses were started, she was very tired; she felt slack and listless in the great heat, drained of all energy. She would have liked to go out with Joe to Midhurst that evening and live quietly there for a day or two, sleeping and riding and playing with the little wallaby. A cautionary instinct warned her not to offend against the rural code of morals by an indiscretion of that sort; if she was to make a success of what she had set out to do for women in that place her own behaviour would have to be above reproach. No mothers in the outback, she knew, would care to let their daughters work for her if it were known that she was spending nights alone at Midhurst with Joe Harman; no married man would care to bring his wife and daughters to an ice-cream parlour run by a loose woman of that sort.
It was a Wednesday, but Sunday was no longer an off day for Jean since it was likely to be the biggest day of all for the ice-cream and soft drinks. She arranged with Joe that he should call for her at the hotel soon after dawn and take her out to Midhurst for the day. She said good-bye to him and went to her room as soon as work stopped in the workshop, pausing only to see the girls from the workshop sampling the ice-cream parlour. She went and lay down on her bed, exhausted and too tired to eat that night; it was refreshingly cool in the workshop building, for the air-conditioner had been on all day. She took off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, and slept in the coolness; she slept so for twelve hours.
She had been out to Midhurst several times since that first visit, and had fitted herself out with a small pair of ringer’s trousers in Bill Duncan’s store for riding, with a pair of elastic-sided ringer’s riding boots to match. She met Joe in the early morning with a little bundle of riding things under her arm, and got into the utility with him. As usual they drove a little way out of town and stopped for an exchange of mutual esteem; as he held her he asked, “How are you feeling this morning?”
She smiled. “I’m better now, Joe. It was the reaction, I suppose — getting it finished and open. I went to bed just after leaving you and slept right through. Twelve solid hours. I’m feeling fine.”
“Take things very easy today,” he said.
She stroked his hair. “Dear Joe. It’s going to be much easier from now on.”
“This bloody weather’ll break soon,” he said. “We’ll get rain starting within the week, and after that it’ll begin to get cool.”
They drove on presently. “Joe,” she said, “I had an awful row this week with the bank manager — Mr. Watkins. Did you hear about it?”
He grinned. “I did hear something,” he admitted. “What really happened?”
“It was the flies,” she said. “It was so hot on Friday, and I was so tired. I went into that miserable little bank to cash the wages cheque and you know how full of flies it always is. I had to wait a few minutes and the flies started crawling all over me, in my hair and in my mouth and in my eyes. I was sweating, I suppose. I lost my temper, Joe. I oughtn’t to have done that.”
“It’s a crook place, that bank is,” he observed. “There’s no reason why it should have all those flies. What did you say?”
“Everything,” she said simply. “I told him I was closing my account because I couldn’t stand his bloody flies. I said I was going to bank in Cairns and get the cash in by Dakota every week. I said I was going to write to his head office in Sydney and tell them why I’d done it, and I said I was going to write to the Bank of New South Wales and offer my account to them if they’d start up a branch here with no flies. I said I used a D.D.T. spray and I didn’t get flies in my workshop and I wasn’t going to have them in my bank. I said he ought to be setting an example to Willstown instead of . . .” She stopped.
“Instead of what?” he asked.
She said weakly. “I forget what I did say.”
He stared straight ahead at the track. “I did hear in the bar you told him he ought to set an example instead of sitting on his arse and scratching.”
“Oh Joe, I couldn’t have said that!”
He grinned. “That’s what they’re saying that you told him, in Willstown.”
“Oh . . .” They drove on in silence for a time. “I’ll go in on Friday and apologise,” she said. “It’s no good making quarrels in a place like this.”
“I don’t see why you should apologise,” he objected. “It’s up to him to apologise to you. After all, you’re the customer.” He paused. “I’d go in there on Friday and see how he’s getting on,” he advised. “I know he got ten gallons of D.D.T. spray on Saturday, because Al Burns told me.”
When they got to Midhurst he made her go at once and sit in a long chair at the corner of the veranda with a glass of lemon squash made with cold water from the refrigerator. He would not let her move for breakfast, but brought her a cup of tea and a boiled egg and some bread and butter on a tray. She sat there, relaxed, with the fatigue soaking out of her, content to have him gently fussing over her. When the day grew hot he suggested that she took the spare bedroom and lay down upon the bed leaving the double doors open at each end of the room to get the draught through; he promised, grinning, not to look if he passed along the veranda. She took him at his word and took off most of her clothes in the spare room and lay down on the bed and slept through the midday heat.
When she woke up it was nearly four o’clock and she was cool and rested and at ease. She lay for a while wondering if he had looked; then she got up and slipped her frock on and went to the shower, and stood for a long time under the warm stream of water. She came to him presently on the veranda, fresh and rested and full of fondness for him in his generosity, and found him squatting on the floor mending a bridle with palm, needle, and waxed thread. She stooped and kissed him, and said, “Thanks for everything, Joe. I had a lovely sleep.” And then she said, “Can we go riding after tea?”
“Still a bit hot,” he said. “Think that’s a good thing?”
“I’d like to,” she said. “I want to be able to sit on a horse properly.”
He said, “You did all right last time.” She had been promoted from the fourteen-year-old Auntie to the more energetic Sally and she was gradually learning how to trot. She found that trotting in that climate made her sweat more than the horse and made it difficult for her to sit down next day, but the exercise, she knew, was good for her. Starting at her age, she would never be a very good rider, but she was determined to achieve the ability to do it as a means of locomotion in that country.
They rode for an hour and a hal
f that evening, coming back to Midhurst in the early dusk. He would not let her stay out longer than that, though she wanted to. “I’m not a bit tired now,” she said. “I believe I’m getting the hang of this, Joe. It’s much easier on Sally than it was on Auntie.”
“Aye,” he said. “The better the horse the less tiring for the rider, long as you can manage him.”
“I’d like to come with you one day up to the top end,” she said. “I suppose it’ll have to be after we’re married.”
He grinned. “Plenty of wowsers back in Willstown to talk about it, if you came before.”
“Do I ride well enough for that?”
“Oh, aye,” he said. “Take it easy and you’ld get along all right on Sally. I never travel more than twenty miles in the day, not unless there’s some special reason.”
He drove her into Willstown in the utility, and as they kissed good-night he said he would be in during the following week. She went to bed that night rested and content, refreshed by her quiet day.
She went to the bank on Friday and cashed the wages cheque as usual; she found that the walls were in the process of being distempered and there was not a fly in the place. Mr. Watkins was distant in his manner and ignored her; Len James, the young bank clerk, gave her her money with a broad grin and a wink. She saw Len again on Saturday afternoon, when he brought in Doris Nash for an ice-cream soda. He grinned at her, and said, “You wouldn’t know the bank, Miss Paget.”
“I was in there yesterday,” she said. “You’re having it all distempered.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You started something.”
“Is he very sore?” she asked.
“Not really,” the boy said. “He’s been wanting to decorate for a long time, but he’s been scared of what the head office would say. There’s not a lot of turnover in a place like this, you know. Well, now he’s doing it.”
“I’m sorry I was rude,” she said. “If you get a chance, tell him I said that.”
