Down a Country Lane. Gary Blinco
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on the rust mottled surface of the corrugated iron roof. The blanket of fog rolled back as they stared, unveiling their new home and burning a collective image into their young minds that would endure forever.
Their excitement overcame their awe as the lifting fog afforded them a clear view of the old house. It was quaint and small, but it seemed large, the stocky man reflected, after the tent on the public reserve where they had been living for several months. His mind wandered back to the reserve as he watched his children take in their surroundings from the wagon. They had not been alone in their depravation; a number of families were reduced to living in makeshift humpies or tents on public reserves, enduring a legacy of hardship left over from the war and the depression.
The reserve was a few miles out of the town and the camp offered very basic amenities to the sorry collection of people who had been thrown together by poverty, or displaced from their homelands by the ravages of war. There were a few communal outbuildings, some foul smelling pit toilets, and a handful of iron tanks that supplied drinking water to the small community, provided the local council remembered to refill the tanks. They often forgot and the community was forced to draw brackish, stagnant water from the nearby creek in order to survive. The people living on the reserve were very poor, earthy in disposition and drawn from diverse cultures, but the community was close and the friendships formed were deep and enduring. These modern-day squatters were the ‘salt of the earth’ some said, eager as they were to put the war behind them and to build new lives for their families. A number of the men had actually fought in the war, many of the women had also served in some direct capacity, and all were touched by it in some way. The primitive conditions of the camp were a small price to pay for those who for years had longed for peace and a new beginning.
The Great Depression and the years up until the end of The Second World War had brought severe hardship to many, including this family it seemed. Norm Blinco smiled quietly to himself as he reflected on the past few years of poverty and hardship. He now had a small farm and a degree of independence and the future looked much brighter. He eased the old horse eagerly towards the cottage, cutting it gently with the whip as if these next few yards would take him across an invisible threshold and away from the bitterness of the past.
The children squealed with delight as they approached the house, excitedly pointing out items of interest as great shafts of sunlight fell over the farm. They romped about in the back of the wagon until it rocked precariously, drawing a word of caution from the man. It was cold as he drew the tired horse to a grateful halt in front of the house, and little white clouds of steam rose from every mouth.
They had left Millmerran in pitch darkness, the children wailing against the bitter cold and crying for the warm beds they had given up with the tearful regret of a baby leaving the womb. But Norm had prevailed and they slipped quietly out of town before the first hint of dawn lit the eastern sky. The week with Norm’s mother in Millmerran had excited and spoiled the children and they were reluctant to leave. They had enjoyed living in a real house, sleeping in beds with crisp clean sheets and eating regular and appetising meals.
His wife, Grace, had enjoyed the experience somewhat less. She felt overpowered and resented by her mother-in-law; the older woman’s disapproval seemed to ooze like venom in her words and acid in her eyes, though Norm said she imagined it all. But she longed to move to the farm permanently, to escape to the freedom of the bush where she could raise her children as she saw fit, and to smoke and swear without censure if she felt the need. But as they had to progressively move their belongings from the reserve to the farm in the small wagon, a week with in-laws was the only sensible alternative. Reluctantly she agreed to the arrangement, as long as it was only for one week.
The fifteen-mile journey in the wagon took several hours and Norm paced the old horse to arrive at just the right moment. He wanted his family to have their first sight of the farm in the early morning so they could share the experience he had enjoyed so often. Now he looked at their bright faces and smiled in quiet satisfaction. He had spent the last week carting numerous wagon-loads of the family’s meagre belongings to the farm, usually arriving just on dawn to savour that first glimpse of the cottage through the fog.
There was a special magic about the place as the sun kissed the tops of the trees and reflected from the iron roof of the house. The world appeared to linger uncertainly between night and day for a short time and Norm felt disconnected from his life as he savoured the blessed interlude – a short span of truce from trouble. He had frequently passed the farm as he worked on various labouring jobs in the area over the years, and slowly he had begun to own the smallholding in his dreams and in his heart. Now, at last, the dream was a reality.
A white frost covered the ground and a soft cobweb of mist hung in the gum trees along the creek that ran through the property. Ancient gums stood along the banks with their toes in the water, with crowns of pale leaves suspended on off- white torsos and long branches outstretched like a priest blessing the land. Knotty mops of mistletoe hung down to the surface of the stream like locks of hair, green, red and yellow strands that bobbed little ripples that spun relentlessly towards the banks. Hundreds of birds greeted their arrival with the most beautiful songs the children had ever heard and they were soon trying to imitate them, their childish voices raised in giggling magpie warbles. Showers of white cockatoos screeched in outrage as they swept away across the morning sky with wings beating the cold air, their flitting shadows racing across the landscape in a dark censure against these human invaders who had appeared in their world.
After the town, everything out here in the bush appeared so peaceful and fresh. Norm sat quietly in the wagon with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, his eyes roaming about the farm as he eagerly drank in its every detail. The garden was an overgrown mess, choked with weeds as nature fought to recover its own, and some of the rooms in the quaint old house had been filled to the rafters with wooden packing cases. The cases had probably been used by the previous owners to pack the vegetables they had grown in the large garden that was still in evidence, despite the weeds. Norm had intended to remove the cases before the family arrived, but time had escaped him. Now he decided to put the older offspring to work on the task instead.
He climbed down stiffly from the wagon, rubbing his hands together briskly against the cold before helping his wife and children to the ground.
‘Righto,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to work! You big kids get those boxes out of the house and stack them beside the shed.’ He pointed to a broken down shed built from rough iron-bark slabs that propped up a peaked roof of rusty flat-iron, a pine door on leather hinges covered the entrance.
‘Mum can sit on the tailboard and nurse the baby until we get the house clear, then we’ll light the stove and cook up a feed.’
As he worked, Norm wondered how long the house had been vacant because he could never remember seeing any sign of life on the farm over the years, and there was an air of neglect about the place. Constructed of cypress pine weatherboards, the house was without lining or ceiling, the bare corrugated iron of the roof sat nakedly on the stark ribs of the rafters, and the internal walls showed the skeleton of the building. Like many bush homes, the house had never seen paint, and it would probably stay that way for many more years.
The cypress pine walls were blackened by the weather and brown rust bled from around the nails to stain the iron roof and spread like spidery wounds down the weatherboards. Two wooden shutter style windows at the side of the house were closed, like sleeping eyelids. It was almost as if the house had been waiting for someone to come along and wake it from a long sleep. Norm proudly opened the windows on their push out poles and the house seemed to come to life and to say
‘welcome’ as the sunlight probed through the cobwebs into the dark interior. He could hear birds walking about on the roof, their feet clattering and squeaking on the corrugated iron.
He stood framed in the window for a moment and winked through the opening at his wife as she sat on the tailboard of the wagon, struggling to control the excited child in her arms.
‘Hurry up you,’ she said, smiling, ‘I can’t hold this little shit much longer.’
Norm