Down a Country Lane. Gary Blinco
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food on the table and new clothes on our backs.
Weeks later, Darryl and I were helping Dad deliver a load of wood to town when one of the wooden spoked rear wheels of the Hupp collapsed under the burden of the wood. I think Dad had progressively increased the load to expedite the transporting process and the old car finally succumbed. After all, it was never designed to cope with the work we were giving it. We were not hurt as we had just left the paddock and we were only moving at walking pace. Dad cursed rather badly as we ground to a halt in a cloud of dust, sending a large part of the load spewing onto the narrow dirt road.
‘Now wouldn’t that fuck ya!’ He hissed, climbing quickly from the truck to inspect the damage. He stood back scratching his head for a moment and twirling his battered felt hat around his finger as he studied the fractured wheel. ‘We better unload the rest of it boy’, he said to Darryl. ‘George, you light a fire and boil the billy, we’ll need a drink of tea while we try and fix the wheel.’ I quickly obeyed his instructions while they unloaded the unit and painstakingly commenced the repairs.
It was hot there beside the narrow gravel road and our shirts clung with sticky irritation to our skin as we worked. Showers of birds moved among the trees above our heads and beyond the canopy of green, the blue summer sky was endless behind a few fleecy white clouds. I sat and watched the billy hissing on the fire and took in the haunting beauty of the bush with its splash of colourful shrubs and wildflowers, and the moving display of birds and butterflies. I don’t think Dad or Darryl even noticed the peaceful surroundings as they toiled with clanking tools and muttered curses. A tractor and plough worked in a paddock across the road, too far off to hear the motor; its image ghostly in the shimmering haze as it dragged a cloud of dust around the field.
Dad’s skill with his hands always amazed me and he soon had the wheel back together and returned to the truck. ‘We better not put the load back on ‘er boys’, he said thoughtfully. ‘I think the old girl’s days as a truck are over.’ Darryl looked surprised as he glanced at the pile of wood, then at Dad and the makeshift truck. ‘But what about the wood?’ he asked, uncharacteristically verbose. ‘We can’t just leave it, somebody will pinch it. And there’s a lot more cut back in the paddock too.’
‘Don’t worry boy’, Dad said quietly, rubbing Darryl on the back. ‘I’ll find another truck, one that can cope with the load. Let’s stack the wood off to the side of the road, then get on home before it gets too dark, the headlights are nilly buggered on this old girl as well.’
Dad must have been doing quite well out of the cordwood because he decided to restore the Hupp to its car state. He went off to an auction somewhere and came home with an old 1929 Chev-six truck. It was a mere bare chassis with half of the cabin missing, but Dad soon had it set up with new boards on the tray and a rebuilt cabin. His carpentry and mechanical skills really came in handy at times. We were now a ‘two vehicle family’, and Mum was very happy to have her own car and the independence it offered. It also allowed her to take Dad his meals as he worked cutting the cordwood, thus saving us from the regular treks through the scrub with the heavy tucker-box.
For the next few months we toiled through whatever hours of daylight nature provided, working the old Chev truck and ourselves hard. While Dad and I carted the loads of wood into town, Darryl worked like a navvy with the axe to cut more wood. He was becoming solid and muscular and could now almost match Dad’s skill with the axe. The load vouchers for the wood ran out and typically Dad did not bother to ask for more while we were at the factory. Instead he sent Mum off to town in the Hupp to get another set.
When she returned to where Dad and I were loading another shipment of wood I saw that she was in tears. Brokenly she explained how the factory had enough wood for the next two years, the boss said. After that time they were changing over to an electric boiler. He thought Dad knew there was only to be the one set of vouchers.
Now we had several loads of wood cut that we could not sell. ‘That old bastard Nusky’, Dad spat angrily. ‘No wonder he was so happy to get out of it.’ He sat habitually scratching his head and twirling his hat for a while. ‘Ah well’, he said at last, standing up and rubbing his back. ‘We got the truck out of it, and we can use the wood at home. C’mon George, let’s get the last load on, you better run over and tell Darryl to stop chopping.’
I ran off across the dry paddock to where Darryl slaved over a log under a cloud of bush-flies, to break the news. ‘Dad said to stop choppin’’, I yelled as I approached. ‘The factory don’t want no more wood, Mum’s bawlin’ about it.’ Darryl stopped chopping gratefully and sat on the log and inspected his blistered hands. ‘Bloody good thing too’, he said, pulling off his sweat-soaked shirt to reveal his finely tuned torso. ‘I was gettin’ sick of it. Mum’ll be orright, we can get back to gardenin’, I like that better.’ That was a long speech for Darryl, which suggested how much he had come to hate the cord wood business.
As we joined Mum and Dad near the truck the rest of the kids were swarming over the pile of wood like ants disturbed from their nest, quickly loading the old unit. Dad was suddenly very cheerful as he called instructions; I think he was sick of the wood business too. Mum just shook her head. Dad got over disappointments quickly and usually found a silver lining. I remembered how a few months before we had split hundreds of fence posts for a cocky. The work completed Dad found the farmer could not pay us. Dad simply brought the posts home and eventually sold them to other local farmers. The process took months and he was forced to sell at discounted prices, making little money out of the exercise when we really needed it. As with this latest disaster, Dad had simply taken it in his stride.
Now that the cord wood business had expired Dad needed something else to challenge his talents and he began to talk about breeding chooks. We always had a few ‘house fowls’, but Dad now contemplated something on a larger more commercial scale. He read an article in one of his old poultry farmer’s journals that inspired him. The article detailed how an enterprising person with a little land and a lot of patience could take day old chicks from infancy to table size and make a killing in the market. Dad said people were desperate for white meat on the table because most of them were thoroughly sick of mutton.
‘Fowl’ as it he called it, was very expensive and reserved for the tables of the well to do. Those people, who ate ‘fowl’, were most likely consuming one of the ‘house fowls’, which had ceased to lay. This would be a dry and tough old bird and would probably be disguised in a stew. Dad’s plan was to breed plump, tender young birds that would command a good price.
Excited, inspired and with a little cash left over from the cord wood venture, my father wrote off to somewhere and ordered one hundred ‘day old chicks’, to be delivered to Yandilla railway siding in two weeks time. Meanwhile, he set about building, from intricate instructions contained in one of his poultry books, a ‘brooder’, to house and nurture the chicks when they arrived. For days, with the enthusiastic support of us all, he cut, snipped and hammered as this strange contraption took shape on the back verandah. The shed had no spare room for him to complete the project; besides, he said the chicks needed to be kept inside for a while so he could keep an eye on them.
One end of the brooder looked like a miniature bird aviary; enclosed in fine wire-mesh it was about six feet long, by three feet wide and two feet high. The other end was completely enclosed with flat iron and wallboard. A low curtain, made from an old blanket, covered the entry between the run and the coop. This allowed the chicks to move out to exercise and to feed from the little troughs that Dad had made for them.
He made a heating system from a kerosene lamp placed on a stand at the hutch end of the brooder. The glass of the lamp sat under the end of a piece of galvanised down pipe, which traversed the roof of the brooder. Hot air from the lamp provided heat to the downpipe, thus keeping the chicks cosy and warm, as it was winter at the time.
He set up this contrivance on the back verandah in the middle of our makeshift bathroom to await the arrival of the chicks. Delving rather deeply into our dwindling cash reserves, he made several trips to town to collect bags of bran, pollard and something he called ‘fowl mash’. The