So This Is Life

by Anne Manne

  After a while he said: ‘Your eggs are better today’.

  ‘Practice makes perfect’, I replied, non-committal, sipping a steaming mug of tea.

  Strangely enough, after that we got along okay. He treated me with a little more respect than his wife.

  The days continued, each one a perfect replica of the day before. Stock work, making Mrs Slavedriver her breakfast, doing all the household chores, after which Mr Slavedriver would return from the paddocks to have lunch. Every day I would make him leftover meat from the night before, cold slabs of mutton or beef, laced with thick ribbons of white, congealed fat, alongside tomatoes and lettuce from the kitchen garden. Over time my eggs and gravy became better and better—anything to make the food more palatable. Then more housework and the evening meal, and while the Slavedrivers and Piglet settled to watch television, I did my final chore, feeding the dogs, always wondering if I was going to get to the top.

  But why the burnt fingertips? Mrs Slavedriver had an odd quirk. Although they were a large and prosperous station, she couldn’t bear to waste matches, declaring it ‘gross extravagance’. So the matches had to be used again and again, one live one lighting the dead ones, until they burned right to the stump, singeing your fingertips on the way down.

  My final altercation with Mrs Slavedriver occurred over the matches. I had been there two months when she saw me light one fresh match after another to prepare the evening meal. She lunged at me in a fury across the kitchen floor, but this time I was defiant.

  ‘No. I’m not doing it. It burns my fingers.’

  I was sacked on the spot. She unleashed a torrent of abuse: I was an upstart, who had looked down on her from the start: I treated her as an ignorant bigot; I had taken no interest in Piglet. Finally she warned me in the direst terms that I was headed for trouble in life if I did not know my place. I spat back that, wherever my place was, it sure as hell wasn’t with the Slavedrivers.

  Mrs Slavedriver stormed off to her bedroom in tears, and a bemused Mr Slavedriver was retrieved from the paddocks to drive me to the station. I was upset by our altercation but determined not to show it. Besides I was free now, heading off to university and another life. I was only too happy to leave Mrs Slavedriver, Piglet and her twice-burned matches. So I burbled chirpily, determinedly, all the way on the long drive into town.

  Mr Slavedriver put my suitcase down on the platform and looked at me, pushing his hat back on his head. His forehead had a large red mark where the rim had been. His face was covered in beads of sweat and I could see the rim was damp. He looked at me, surveying me, but with very different eyes from when he had first met me. Then he gave a short laugh, shaking his head as if in bafflement and left. He climbed back into his white ute, gunned the engine, and took off, a plume of red dust billowing out behind it.

  It is a truth commonly acknowledged that the world is divided into dog and cat people. It is a truth less commonly acknowledged that the world is also divided into cow and goat partisans. And for much the same reason. Those partial to the fawning dependency of a devoted dog, also prefer the soft, doe-eyed presence of the not-too-bright jersey cow. Those who like the coolness and independence of a cat prefer the insouciant canniness of a beady-eyed goat. It all turns on the question of one’s relation to ambivalence, whether one likes to dominate; or whether one enjoys a certain aloofness of character, creatures who bestow affection rather than beg it, and who are self-willed rather than obedient.

  I am resolutely in the cat and goat camp. Goats are clever, sharp-eyed as to the main chance, even sometimes a little bit wicked. Whatever it is you, the human, might want, they keep a clear view of their own interests with an indomitable spirit. Think of all those turns of phrase in the English language speaking to a goat’s qualities: clinging like a mountain goat, nimble as a mountain goat, as tough or wily as an old goat. All these expressions bespeak wiry resilience and the ability to survive in the harshest climates and circumstances.

  As a university student living in the inner city, I had become a part-owner of a half-grown kid goat called Tobias. He resided at the agistment farm where I kept my horse on the outskirts of Melbourne. Tobias was grey and white, with a small, pointed beard. He was entirely charming and entirely ruthless. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but looking back, Susan, the woman who ran the farm, must have been rather eccentric, for alongside a couple of Dalmatians, many cats and a young child, Tobias had the run of her old bluestone house, leaving numerous little hard pellets of goat shit for her to clean up. One would hear his hard cloven hooves clattering on the cobbled stone floor as he came through the front door and wandered up the corridor, usually pausing to examine the toddler’s room for rusks. He would saunter over to the kitchen table where we were sitting with a cup of tea, then climb onto a chair and snaffle whatever food was nearby, his hooves neatly folded beneath him. Since the dogs and cats were allowed to do the same it didn’t seem all that remarkable. And Susan’s daughter never sat with her own plate, but only ever ate food from her father’s, so there was a kind of anarchic logic to the liberties granted to the small creatures, human and non-human, in that house. Sometimes if we sat outdoors on a sunny morning at an outdoor picnic table, Tobias would join us, climbing onto a hard plastic chair, sitting on his bottom, hind legs splayed outward, front legs placed deftly between them, his head on the side, looking at us quizzically as the conversation moved from person to person. If that made us laugh, he cocked his head even further, as if asking: ‘What’s so funny?’

  I am not quite sure what happened to Tobias, except that, as he became a billy, he became rather a bully. His horns grew and Susan had all kinds of dramatic stories of outrage to tell me, the rogue’s co-owner, whenever I came up. He always seemed pleased to see me, however, or at least the kitchen treats I had brought him. Consequently, in all their disputes I tended to be on Tobias’s side, presenting the goat’s point of view so to speak. This enraged Susan still further. In retrospect, I was influenced far too much by my affection and Tobias’s always-innocent countenance and too little by her harrowing accounts of his increasing delinquency. I realised this as she showed me the bruises after the final showdown—a scuffle over who had rights to the chook bin. He had lowered his now-magnificent horns and charged her.

  Some years later, now graduated, I was leading an intense life, teaching at Melbourne University, involved in political activism, but also longing for a private space not intruded upon by the life I led—or the social world—of the city. ‘You’re always disappearing,’ a friend said, half-angrily. The very intensity of that life, however, meant I also longed for a space—another Island perhaps—to re-create that feeling of being lost to the world I had had in childhood, for the kind of solitude which allows the creative, incommunicado self to flourish. One way of establishing the distance I needed was to put space, territory, between me and the world. One day, as I idly looked at a map, I thought, what better barrier, in fact, than the Great Dividing Range?

  I found a small, dilapidated and very cheap cottage for rent in the mountains, not quite alpine terrain but almost. The country was rugged, so beautiful it made one gasp, a landscape lush and rugged, heavily wooded with dense mountain ash forest. The hills were huge and spectacular, rearing up with a kind of savagery from the damp valleys below, in which clouds of eerie mist hung. It was both more dramatic and much wetter than the open valleys, scrubby bush with spindly paperbarks and ancient, rounded hills of the Midlands of my childhood. At the time I thought it the most glorious landscape I had ever seen, so vivid it took your breath away, but it was to me a foreign beauty that I always felt an outsider to, not one I felt in my bones. Objectively, it was more beautiful than the country I had grown up in. But it was not my country.

  And in fact this landscape never became ‘home’. I often puzzled over my response. I kept waiting to fall in love with it. Why could I not glory in the lushness of the forest so brooding and ominous? Yet I more often felt it oppressive and claustrophobic, th
an romantic, longing for the easy, open woodland and gentle grassy hills of childhood. There were bellbirds, rosellas and lyrebirds, but it was the odd, haunting cry of the currajong, signalling the onset of a harsh, bleak winter that symbolised this country for me. Even now if I hear a currajong’s cry—plaintive and bleak—I think of the long, cold, dark and lonely winters where wet and cold seeped into one’s very bones.

  I went up to the cottage on weekends and long breaks, driving with my black cat Nebbie on my lap. He purred loudly all the way. The cottage was made of the poor man’s material, grey fibro cement sheeting. Yet inside it was surprisingly lovely, with a simple aesthetic belied by its outward appearance. The ceiling and upper walls were painted white but had dark brown wooden beams and dark wood panelling. It had tiny windows with divided panes and old lace curtains, once white but now made yellowy cream by age. It had an open fire in the living room; each weekend I would chop wood for the next week. The toilet and shower were in a freezing outhouse, and a small chip wood heater had to be lit and roaring before there was any hot water or possibility of a shower. Tending to it was always my first duty on arrival.

  I brought Joe, my horse, down from Susan’s, and installed him on a local farm. I dug and planted a vegetable patch and bought some glamorous Chinese Silky hens with their attractively feathered slippers and wild topknots, which I named Daisy, Lily and Ivy after the great aunts. They soon gave up the chicken coop for a dead loss and escaped, deciding instead to roost permanently on an outdoor washing line strung across the porch. Every evening there was a great squawking and commotion as they flapped into orbit, like jumbo jets groaning on takeoff, heaving their heavy bodies up onto the cable. I thought about forcing them to stay in the coop, but it seemed dreary and smelly and so I could see their point of view. It meant they no longer laid eggs in their neat laying boxes in the shed, so when I arrived I would set about a weekly treasure hunt, searching for the eggs they had laid under various bushes in the garden. I thought they knew that they were safe from foxes up there roosting on the wire. On the other hand, their wisdom and survival instincts could be called into question. They were the first chickens I had ever owned, so I wasn’t sure whether it was all chickens or just mine, but Daisy, Lily and Ivy were not very bright. When you approached them on their perch, they puffed out their chests and held their breath, squeezed their eyes tight shut, all in unison, as if hoping that if they did not see you, you were really not there. Then they would open them again cautiously, take a peep, and then firmly shut their eyes to make you disappear again. It seemed a strategy unlikely to defeat the wily Mr Fox.

  Despite the vegetable patch and the chickens, and my nearby horse, however, there was something missing. That something was a goat. I began looking for one. Not a billy like Tobias, who might become unmanageable, but a female, which I could milk. I planned to make cheese, which I would hang in muslin bags to drain the whey over the sink. In between reading for university classes, I devoured everything I could find on goat’s milk, and the properties of their cheese. I practised with cow’s milk and soon rather smelly, soggy bundles of cheesecloth were dangling over the sink at my inner city share house, much to the dismay of the housemates.

  But what kind of goat? Somewhere among my cheese-making research I came upon a photo of an Anglo-Nubian goat. The Anglo-Nubian was The Platonic Goat. I had to have one. I loved the shape of their heads, the calm, wise eye, and the long, floppy ears which drooped down alongside their chin, the golden brown and ochre colour of their coats. When I gazed at them it was like breathing in an ancient, desert wind bearing a certain kind of survival wisdom. I began to pore over the classifieds in my favourite newspaper, The Weekly Times, for a suitable goat that I could add to my growing menagerie.

  Soon I found one. ‘Quality Milking Goats for Sale.’ There was no phone number, just an address in the ranges and ‘After 6 p.m. Good Home Only’. It was a long way away. The sun was setting by the time I found the place. The moon was rising, thankfully a full moon, and mist was settling over the valley in a dense blanket. I couldn’t raise anyone at the house so I began walking up a small hillock. I heard them before I saw them.

  I could hear the tinkling of goat bells, the muffled sound of many hooves in the soft, dusty earth and a woman’s voice, calling out in a soft, reassuring singsong. Just then, over the crest, they appeared: a herd of goats illumined by the moonlight, and an old woman in the middle of them, soft wisps of cloud wafting around them. Helga stepped out of this cloud. She wore a long, flowing garment, and had a wooden staff in one hand. She had long, greying, once-blonde hair and a rather elongated face which somehow communicated a dignified sorrow. By her accent she seemed German or Swiss. Helga gestured to various goats, all of which were for sale.

  Right in the middle of the herd was one exquisite, golden goat, with a dainty face and delicately formed, feminine muzzle, long droopy ears falling softly on either side of her head, eyes calm, knowing and self-possessed. I could not take my eyes off her. Her coat was neither the white of the Saanen nor the brown of the Nubian, but a delicate golden colour with a touch of cinnamon. And indeed Cinnamon, or Cinn-Ah-Mon in Helga’s delightfully accented English, was her name. I was enchanted. I had fallen in love.

  Unhappily, Helga felt exactly the same way about Cinn-Ah-Mon. She clearly did not want to part with her. This goat was the prize of her herd. But I was filled with desire. This goat was The One. Helga was dubious, for she said I had not kept goats before. Rashly I mentioned my half-share in Tobias but that did not qualify me in Helga’s eyes for the ownership of the Golden One. Helga kept gesturing to all the other goats, but I had eyes only for Cinn-Ah-Mon. I was very persuasive. I recklessly offered more than I could afford and agreed to be instructed by Helga as to all the preparations I would make to my place to make it habitable for Cinn-Ah-Mon. Helga finally, reluctantly, agreed. As I drove away I felt just a little guilty at having overridden her reluctance.

  I set to work happily each weekend at the cottage to prepare for the arrival of my golden goat. Neither Helga nor I had a telephone, and it was long before the arrival of email and mobile telephones, so we communicated by handwritten letters. My letters were eager, full of excitement and anticipation. Helga’s—I could not help noticing—were full of regret and even reproachful. They had a sombre, sorrowful tone I thought born of an interesting past. Soon I realised, however, that it was likely that this had more to do with the unexpectedly heavy responsibilities of goat ownership.

  There were many things Helga insisted had to be done before I would make an acceptable goat owner. There was no pupil keener to learn and no teacher more difficult to please. Owning a goat—or at least Cinn-Ah-Mon—was proving unexpectedly challenging. I had no idea it was so complicated, or a goat’s needs so various and, on occasion, obscure. It was true that I did not have many sources of information; there was the eccentrically raised Tobias, but I now realised he was not at all a well-brought-up goat. My sole other source of information was a charming and cherished English children’s story, called Whiskery Jinks and the Donkey Cart, featuring an impossibly vain cat, a dim-witted donkey and a clever goat which ate everything within sight, including gentlemen’s hats. This, however, as I now discovered, was an entirely misleading account.

  Little did I realise, until I met Helga, just how fragile and delicate a goat’s—or perhaps Cinn-Ah-Mon’s—constitution was. A goat’s survival, contrary to and notwithstanding all hat-eating, tough goat clichés above, was by no means guaranteed. Any bucolic imagery of the Golden One’s new home, carefully described in my handwritten letters, not only failed to persuade her, but was immediately retranslated into a valley of death. The peach tree, for example, meant fruit bats. If Cinn-Ah-Mon ate any food contaminated with bat droppings she could catch a fatal virus. Every night at dusk I would go out with a flashlight, and inspect the nearby mountain ash trees for evidence of bats. Fortunately I found none. Helga meantime had lost interest in bats and had moved on to the subject of toxic pl
ant specimens. Unfortunately, in my letter covering victory on the bat front, I had waxed a little lyrical and mentioned the bracken fronds waving in the breeze. The reply flashed back by return mail, faster than Australia Post usually managed, marked Urgent in a savage hand across the top. In it was a stern ultimatum. If there was any bracken on the property Cinn-Ah-Mon would, after a period of the most intense suffering, die.

  This occasioned a frantic tug of war every weekend with the pesky things, digging and hacking, finally falling into bed, panting with exhaustion. But it was the mountains— bracken was everywhere! No matter how hard I established a bracken-free haven, by next weekend I would look in despair on the new bracken shoots which had popped up during the week that I was away.

  Perhaps Cinn-Ah-Mon could be tethered, I wrote in desperation, and thus kept out of harm’s way? The reply was instant: ‘Tethered!’ The word was spat across the page in a contemptuous fury. Apparently no self-respecting goatherd would ever tether a goat. Cinn-Ah-Mon had never been tethered in her life. Nor should she be. The risks were manifold—lack of food, becoming tangled and being unable to reach the water, and dying of thirst. Even … gulp, strangulation. Grotesque and appalling images flashed up before me of Cinn-Ah-Mon’s dainty face with her eyes popping out and rope cutting into golden fur.

  I was stricken by the shame of proposing such an inferior way of keeping Cinn-Ah-Mon. I was trying to convince Helga of my worth as a goatherder and, here I was, sunk down to the level of a likely goat-killer. I was going to require a lot of rehabilitation in her eyes. Drenched with guilt I wrote back, promising Cinn-Ah-Mon would never be tethered. I would build an enclosure, around the goat shed. Soon it smelled sweetly of wood-chips and the hay I had ready for her.

  I wrote another letter, saying I had prepared Cinn-Ah-Mon’s goat shed and yard, and hung a net with fresh meadow hay. Helga replied that over the week I was away, any hay left out would certainly turn mouldy. Mouldy hay contained botulism, one of the deadliest microbes, so unless my storage system was perfect, Cinn-Ah-Mon was at risk. Or at least, according to Helga. And every time I satisfied one of Helga’s requirements the bar seemed to be raised one notch higher.