Down a Country Lane. Gary Blinco
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of animals. He remained in the vehicle the whole time, loath for his children to see his own wet eyes. The boy continued to stare at the only part of the dead dog now visible from its rough internment, the large blue-grey head. He watched as the image receded from sight in the gathering gloom and the scrub closed in, obliterating the clearing, the melon hole and the dog. ‘Goodbye Pluto’, he thought simply. ‘Goodbye.’
The years slipped by and Norm chased his dream relentlessly, the first few crops were good and he could see a brighter future somewhere over the horizon, a little out of sight but not out of reach. Sometimes he appeared almost unconscious of the outside world around him, content to let someone else deal with the business of driving the broader community as the years passed. His own pleasures were few and simple. His wife, his kids, the farm, a rare beer or rum and his constant smoke. Whatever he was to achieve in the future, he thought, would be realised through his family as he watched them grow.
In his obtuse way he was committed only to the land and the future of his offspring, nothing else mattered. He believed that the small farm would provide a solid platform to springboard them all into their own lives, and that he would be able to increase his farming output enough to support their needs. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like, in the distant future, to greet his grandchildren to the farm, but for the time being he could contemplate no other life than the one he now enjoyed.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘The life so short, the craft so long to learn’
Hippocrates
About six years had passed and I was no longer the helpless child who had first come to the farm in my mother’s arms. While my memories of those very early days were obscure, I often experienced a vivid recollection of some event or other. I know we had been at the farm for several years when Dad suddenly appeared to be spending an increasing amount of time away. Money was tight as usual and, as much as he hated it, Mum convinced him that he had to do some work for wages to make ends meet. He often disappeared for days at a time as he worked at various tasks, but he always reappeared miraculously with supplies just as we were about to run out of food. Our confidence in Dad grew and we never doubted his ability to deliver enough for us to survive, and survival was all we knew and therefore all we wanted.
Dad now saw himself as his own man; a self-employed farmer and he hated the prospect of working for a boss again. I do not know what bad experience in his past caused him to hate working for a boss with such passion, but he resisted the option until there was no alternative. It must have been with great reluctance on his part, but common sense won out in the end and he looked for work while Mum and we kids ran the farm. There always seemed to be plenty of work about if he wanted it. He was a good all round handyman and could turn his hand to most things if he chose to.
Dad’s reputation as a handyman had spread throughout the district. The local farmers (Cockies as Dad called them begrudgingly) often came around to commission him to repair an engine, build a fence or do some carpentry work. He had set up a sawmill a few months ago for a farmer who wanted to mill the cypress pine timber on his block in order to build two farmhouses. Dad had worked in timber mills with my grandfather so he knew how to set up a sawmill from scratch. He gained almost legend status with the mill project and I think he could have taken it further, perhaps developing his own mill. However, the job completed and the farmhouses built, he seemed to lose interest.
When he wanted work it was usually there for the asking, but with Dad the asking was the problem most of the time. He preferred people to ask him first, that way he could reconcile his pride by being seen to help a neighbour in trouble. Thus it became a bit of a dilemma because most of the bigger farmers were afraid of offending his fiercely independent nature by offering him work. But he took to working for wages for a while and spending too much time away from us all in the process.
Of course we children all thought Dad was simply the smartest person on earth, probably because we had little basis for comparison, though I often thought he was sometimes big on dreams and short on action. He liked to sit on the back steps for hours, smoking, looking into the distance and dreaming. While he had many good ideas they mostly fizzled out in the end due to lost interest, lack of capital or both.
It was a blistering hot summer’s day, the bush alive with birds and butterflies and the garden lush with a maturing crop, but Dad came home through the wonders of nature in a foul mood. I ran out to meet him, to catch a ride down the lane on the running board of the Overland. To my surprise and pain he cuffed me on the ear and sent me sprawling away from the car into the hard black earth beside the lane. ‘Don’t you know that’s bloody dangerous, you stupid little galah’, he yelled as I stared up at him with a mixture of pain and surprise. ‘If I run over you, your mother would never let me hear the end of it.’ Dad often spoiled me and this unusual action sent me running and bawling ahead of him into the house, burying my teary face in Mum’s apron. Mum met Dad at the door, a bit wide- eyed and confused herself.
‘Why did you hit the poor little bugger?’ She demanded. ‘You let him ride on the running board all the time. Who were you really hitting?’
Dad angrily washed his face and hands at the battered washstand. ‘Yeah, I know, sorry George’. He patted my head, and I felt loved again. ‘It’s that jumped up bastard Twidale’, he growled. ‘You know, the one who won the fucking war in New Guinea on his own. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a bloody cook in the army, the rotten mongrel.’
Dad swore a lot, but not usually the real strong kind, just a few bloody and bastard words, to season his speech like herbs in cooking. Now he used words that I had not heard before, his face red under his dark tan. Mum was quiet; she had seen this side of him before. For whatever reason, he had not served in the armed forces during the war and he became very angry whenever the subject came up. His reaction seemed worse if people started spinning war stories, and somehow Twidale seemed to crystallise his feelings on the matter.
His attitude to the returned men was unusual because very few of the local men had served in the war, so it was not as if he were the odd man out. The farmers were all second or third generation primary producers and, as such, they were not encouraged by the government to go into the services. Food production was as important as fighting during those dark years.
‘Don’t let him get to you love’, Mum soothed. ‘There are others who want you to do work for them. Keith Simmons was here earlier today and he wants you to sew some wheat bags for him, sixpence a bag he said.’ Keith Simmons was one of a family of five brothers who owned the land next to ours; they were our neighbours on three sides. Their father, now retired but still living on one of the blocks, had pioneered the property, growing cattle and sheep. The sons had divided the large holding into separate blocks and they took one each. I think they were having difficulties getting on together and dividing the land gave them independence. They now grew mostly cereal crops, but they still co-operated on some joint projects. Between them they provided Dad with a lot of work.
My father brightened at this news. He liked sewing bags; it was a task he could perform without conscious thought, leaving his mind free to dream. And the local farmers liked his work because he filled the bags tightly with grain and the stitches never leaked when they loaded the bags on the trucks. This was an important consideration, grain was valuable, and was sold on weight. He could sew five hundred bags on a good day, so it was good money when we needed it most. Mum contemplated a good Christmas on the bag sewing money. Dad dried his hands on an old towel. ‘Good’, he scowled. ‘I told twit Twidale to repair his own shearing shed. I hope it falls down on him and all his prize rams. I’ll never do another turn of work for the toffee nosed cunt.’ He never did either, as far as I can remember. I found his words difficult to understand – I liked mister Twidale. Mum was always friendly with the family. But of course she was friendly with all of the neighbours, it was a simple matter of good business ethics. People now came to the farm almost every day to buy vegetables from her and to talk. The more of the crop she could sell directly from the garden, the less work we had to do in selling it in town.
Most of the local men were about my father’s age and, while he didn’t seem