Best Australian Short Stories (21 page)

In bed he wore a nightgown and nightcap. I saw him in them once when he returned to the living-room, after going to bed, for something he had forgotten. I had never seen such garments and, in combination with whiskers, the sight overwhelmed me. I think my astonished stare embarrassed him a little, an embarrassment he sought to turn to humorous account with a large wink before darting from view.

He was not one to take part in evening activities. After tea he would scratch his beard a little while the washing-up was in progress, then remove his boots, and, carrying them, depart stocking- foot to his room at the opposite end of the small dwelling. Sometimes he would take with him a large seedsman’s catalogue, the only book I ever saw in his hands, to read for a few minutes in bed before putting out the light. On these occasions—much to the annoyance of us young ones—he would interrupt the elementary card game or snakes-and-ladders that followed washing-up by communicating the results of his study in a voice that carried clearly through the hessian partitions.

“Jessie! Annie! Are you thuure?”

“Yes, dad.”

“I think I’ll plant ’taters between the Jonathans, where we had the beans last yuur.”

Silence from the players absorbed with their game.

“Jessie! Annie! Do you huur me?”

“Yes, dad.”

Another silence.

“Jessie! Annie! Are you thuure?”

A resigned voice: “Yes, dad.”

“It says here, that Yates’s Mammoth Maincrop is the thing for cool climates and heavy soils, but I don’t care for ’em. I think I’ll plant Bates’s Early Wonder, same as I did yuur afore last.”

Silence, accompanied by glances of exasperation between the players.

“Jessie! Annie! Do you huur me?”

“Ye-e-e-s! Of course we can hear you!” And mumblingly, “Worse luck!”

Mr Sims had little time for reading even his seedsman’s catalogue. In his reckoning, when it was too dark for work it was time for sleep. In this he was something of a household tyrant. Soon after we heard the catalogue flop on the floor we could hear his voice inquiring whether we were ever going to bed, and expressing surprise that we still had the. lamp burning. These words, addressed ostensibly to the younger members of his household, were perhaps also by way of tactful intimation to his spouse, Lucy, that it was time she laid aside her darning and joined him in sleep.

He would wear us down in the end, and we would break up reluctantly, the girls to their room adjoining the living-room and I to my bunk in a little room at the end of the barn, there to be companioned before falling asleep by the munching of the horse in his stable at the other end of the building, the occasional rattle of the watchdog’s chain, the spooky call of a mopoke, or the complaining bark of a fox in the nearby bush.

Mr Sims had selected a hundred acres on the edge of the big timber country; heavily forested land, some of the trees as thick through the butt as the length of a couple of axe-handles. My arrival was in the fourth year when, a little at a time, ten acres had been cleared, ploughed, and planted with fruit-trees, and a house and barn had been built. But clearing was still going on at the edge of the bush in the intervals between caring for the young orchard, so I came to know what it meant to uproot the living forest with a few small tools and make it vanish back to the elements.

It took upwards of half a week of sweat and hard breathing with mattock, shovel, and axe to grub and fell one of those trees. It went over at last like grandeur undone, its leaves wailing, and crashed to earth with terrible and dusty impact. Its trunk lay dramatically inert, and the yellow ends of its shattered tangle of branches seemed to protest dumbly against our triumph. The severed roots of the stumps were cocked up as high as a man’s head; you could have buried a dray in the hole you had dug; and two men could see each other only from the chest up across its prone trunk. The trunk had to be sawn through in several places, the branches lopped and cut into manageable lengths, the stump end rolled clear of the hole, and the sawn logs of the trunk swung round and piled for burning—human strength and the craft of pole and lifting-jack pitted against earth’s tenacious clutch of her own.

The fires had to be stoked for weeks on end, as well as being shaken down each night—spark fountains leaping in the dark—before you went to bed. Every chip from the axe, stick and fragment of wood, had to be stooped for and fed in armfuls to the fires. While the burning went on—and that was just one tree—the buttress roots remaining in the ground had to be traced and uncovered to below plough depth, cut through in several places, torn from their moorings in the subsoil, and lifted and cast on the fires, then the. heavy clay returned, shovelful by shovelful, to the holes from which stump and root had come. From all this you got some idea of how much had been done since the day Mr Sims and Ernie had pitched their tent in the forest and made a start.

When we paused for a breather or a strengthening snack it was Mr Sims’s habit to sit facing the young orchard, fondling his beard and heartening himself in present labour with the thought of labour well done. At such moments he was prone to live past struggles over so fully as to forget that another son now toiled beside him.

“Ernie, d’you mind that whopping big gum that stood right where the end of that row of Ribston Pippins is now?” he would say, turning round. “Oh, it’s you Harry! Well, Ernie looked up at that tree and he said to me, Dad,’ he said, ‘we won’t get the best of this bugger inside a twelvemonth!’ Man, he was a big ‘un!” Here Mr Sims paused to dwell in thought on the size of the branching giant that had been vanquished, and to give us time to imaginc its proportions. “But we got rid of him!” he added in triumphant recollection. “By frawst, we did!”

In addition to the living trees there were the stumps of the dead, like great half-decayed teeth, to be dug and wrenched piece-meal from the earth and piled for burning, and the striving horde of saplings to be worried loose with mattock and axe one by one and gathered up to the fires, and the ground raked clean of every thing that might foul the tillage. It was Mr Sims’s pride that there should be no by-passed stumps in the cultivation, no forest litter to sour the soil, no hidden root to snub the flow of the plough. When at last the acre marked was cleared it looked strangely tidy, like a schoolyard on .a Saturday morning, only that the earth was criss-crossed with red and white bars where the log fires had been.

There were only light cultivation tools on the selection, so a man had to be brought froth a distant place with a heavy plough and three big horses to break up the ground; and the heavy earth gave to his mould-board with unwilling groans and the explosive snap-ping of small roots; and the yellow-grey furrows lay over against each other as hard and unyielding as paving slabs. It was left to lie like that, to weather, while we shifted the fence to include the new cultivation. Then the sods were ready to break down and must be ploughed and harrowed and rolled and ploughed and harrowed again and made up into banked lands before the little fruit-trees were set out in their sedate rows.

It was Mr Sims’s ambition to recreate on his selection the Kentish garden of his youthful recollections, and his orchard was a picture of careful tillage. Just as the company of well-bred people gives you the feeling, “Here is gentleness”, or a library, “Here is learning”, so when you came to Mr Sims’s place you had the feeling, “Here is husbandry.” I felt it myself when first I entered the gate, though 1 had no word for it.

The grown apple-trees to the right as you went down the lane leading to the house were as straight in their latticed rows as if they had been set out by some exact machine; and there were no ragged headlands or weedy corners; ground that couldn’t be reached with the plough was turned by the spade, right up to the fence-posts. Between the apple-trees, in their rows, gooseberry bushes were growing, two at equal distances between each tree, and between the lines of apple-trees there were rows of vegetables. On the left-hand side there were two acres of raspberry-plants, the canes supported, not, as was the local custom, by stakes driven through the crown of the plants, but by being trained on wire fencing stretched taut along the rows. The fork-dug ground was free from much as a single leaf of weed or sorrel. The lane itself was fenced from the cultivation and the strip on each side of the cart-track sown with grass—a bit of Saturday afternoon grazing for the horse.

The house comprised three rooms in a row, light and cheap in construction, but comfortable, with a raised wooden floor, papered walls, a fireplace, a slabbed veranda with a garden strip in front of it, and a grass plot adjoining for bleaching clothes.

The barn was built of slabs, split from vanished trees, adzed smooth and fitted close. It had an iron roof, and its supporting timbers were the straightest and soundest to be won from the bush. There was a tool-room at one end of the barn, with, behind it, a small bunk-room, which was my sleeping-quarters; adjoining both these was the wagon shelter. Through a door from that was a store-room for the products of the soil; beyond that was a stable where the horse could be warm on winter nights, and, adjoining his stall, the bail where the two cows were milked. It was a model barn and the subject of approving comment from all callers.

To the right, below the barn, was the second year planting of young trees, standing in a catch-crop of red clover; and to the left, below the lane that led across the bottom of the raspberry patch to the bush paddock, was the third year planting of fruit trees—pronged sticks, merely—standing in a catch-crop of rye, just greening the ground.

Mr Sims lived in two worlds, that of his present labour and that of his early recollections, and they wove in and out of his thoughts as he worked, each the inspiration of the other. He would pause sometimes in the midst of work—when a breathing spell was reasonably indicated—to speak of the past; or would be very easily stimulated by question or comment to point the differences between Old Country and local methods, even to his own disparage-ment.

I commented once on the straightness of a furrow he had just turned in starting the winter ploughing-out in the four-year-old orchard.

“Straight!” said he. “Oh, no boy! That’s as crooked as a dog’s hind-leg!”

He paused to give time for this correction to sink in, staring at me the while from wide blue eyes which dared to point out that his furrow really was straight except for a very small wobble half-way along. Then followed an explanation of how ploughing was done in Kent; and not, mind you, just in a two-acre patch, but a furrow drawn the length of a twenty-acre field. The ploughman would be expected to cut his furrow as straight as a taut string and with the turned earth lying over as smooth as if it had been trowelled from end to end! He was no ploughman if he couldn’t!

It was the same with almost everything about the place that I found reason to admire. It might be good enough in its way—and he was grateful in so far as he might accept my words as a compliment to a man who was doing his best under adverse conditions—but it was always about three jumps behind Kent. “Yuurce! Yuurce!” he would say after telling me about the thatching, the stabling, the hop-picking, or the milking byres of Kent, and stare into the distance awhile from his blue-grey eyes before turning back to his task.

I came to regard Kent as a sort of fabled country, something to look back on much as the people of the Dark Ages must have looked back on the fabled days of Roman order, so that I was a little surprised and disconcerted to note that Harry was not always at one with his father in reverential regard for Kentish ways. I noticed it first when the winter pruning of the four-year-old apple- trees was under way. Mr Sims had not changed his ideas of prun-ing during his years away from Kent, while Harry had absorbed some of the ideas of his own country. In most things about the farm he honoured his father’s superior knowledge, but in the matter of pruning he felt that Mr Sims had something new to learn and that he must take a stand. They argued the matter while they worked, and the sound of their dispute came down from among the twiggy trees. Neither would yield, and, as they worked facing each other, one side of each row of trees was pruned in Kent, so to speak, and the other at Tommy’s Hut.

Notwithstanding this significant clash, I continued to accept the fable—it was a happy one—and my acceptance stimulated Mr Sims in his own belief in it, even sentimentalizing it to a point that led him into a rather shattering encounter with his son. One day, following a recent talk by him on the splendid spectacle of huntsmen riding to hounds, and of the generosity of the Kentish gentry at Yuletide, he came to me with a very happy glint in his eyes—the glint of one who has inadvertently stumbled upon evidence substantiating a theme. He was carrying a folded sheet of paper, which I happened to have seen before, and which I knew had reached the farmstead wrapped round some groceries. He unfolded it and held it before me. It was from an English illustrated journal, and on the page facing me were rows of photographs of rural gentlemen in hunting garb, shooting rig-outs, and velveteen jackets.

“Now, boy!” exclaimed Mr Sims, beaming at me over the top of the page like a benign but expectant schoolmaster, and quite evidently expecting me to recall our earlier conversations. “Now, boy! If I were to ask you which of these men was a typical dee-ar old English country gentleman, which would you say?”

He had overlooked the nearby presence of Harry. Harry snorted as if his nostrils had exploded. “Dee-ar old English country gentleman!” he repeated in drawling mimicry. Mr Sims bent on him a look of mingled embarrassment and reproach, before thrusting the sheet into my hands and darting off.

It was not in the mind of Mr Sims alone that thoughts of the fabled land of Kent wove in and out of the realities of the moment. His stories set up the same habit with me, and one day I asked him a question which I had been pondering for some time, and which drew an enlightening answer. We were fork-digging the raspberry plantation. You bent your back for long periods at a stretch and nothing could be heard but the sound of heavy breathing, the shifting of feet on the soil, and the occasional ring of a fork prong on a pebble. You worked like this because as soon as the raspberries were forked there would be the potatoes to hill-up in the top orchard, or the young fruit-trees to spray; or if nothing was calling for immediate attention in the orchard there were some fence-posts to be split.