Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th)

by Carrie Tiffany

  Toilet Hints for the Modern Mother

  If on the too plump side after your confinement consider a few weeks of reducing but take care not to reduce too quickly. Nature needs time to readjust herself to the new conditions. If you reduce too quickly flabby muscles will be the unlovely result. Don’t encourage a visit from the ageing neck – she will surely come to stay.

  Robert buys me a crate of oranges and says I must eat them all. The oranges were grown in Mildura. Oranges. Full of Goodness From The Sun. Eat More Oranges Every Day in Every Way, says the sticker on the side of the crate. This would have been enough for me – the waxy sheen of the oranges, some still with a few leaves, a piece of sharp stem attached. The history of the fruit relives as I rub the peel between my hands to release the oil, hold them to my face and inhale. Hello, Dad. But as well as the oranges, which Robert describes as a nutritional supplement, there is an outing – tickets for a rare performance of the Vienna Mozart Boys’ Choir to be held in Kerang.

  We have been following the travels of the choir, twenty boys on a world-wide tour, recently arrived from New Zealand, in the newspaper. As our new Prime Minister Menzies tours country Victoria, so too, coincidentally, does the choir. While the choir sings to the graziers of Coleraine, Prime Minister Menzies visits a new dairy plant at Warrnambool. As the boys rehearse in St Arnaud, Mr Menzies is at a nearby Pomonal merino stud having the delicacies of artificial insemination explained to him so euphemistically he has no idea what he has just heard. The choir and the Prime Minister shadow each other from town to town. Mr Menzies and his entourage of advisors (things are rocky in Europe, instant speeches may be required), and twenty fine Austrian boys, well schooled in their evocations of the Danube, of the snow-capped mountains and great cities of the Fatherland.

  The Ensign says that the Vienna Mozart Boys’ Choir puts the birds to shame. That they are even better than currawongs. We drive to Kerang in convoy with the rest of the Wycheproof contingent. Robert wears his good blue suit and I have sewn some diamond-shaped panels of green cotton into my yellow frock to make it roomier for my expanding waist.

  Someone rings a handbell and we find our seats in the hall. A dusty curtain jerks aside to reveal twenty boys in white pompadour wigs and red lipstick. Half of them wear ice-blue crinolines; their pale shoulders rise sharply from the low-cut dresses. The other half wear Mozart suits – long jackets, knickerbockers and tights. There is a crushed and tired look about them – lopsided wigs, a vase of badly bent peacock feathers in the middle of the stage, sagging crinoline hoops. A few seconds’ silence, then a soft communal intake of breath. Finally a sound so indescribably pure it seems unlikely it could be coming from the shabby scene in front of us. Some people in the audience actually turn and look over their shoulders to try and locate the true source of the sound. It rolls and grows around us, gaining in force and sweetness. The audience is not so much held still by the sound, but let free. Backs and necks unfurl. Heads reach out, inclined, towards the sound.

  They sing Mozart’s love opera, Bastien und Bastienne. The boys’ voices slide together and apart, adding and subtracting with mathematical perfection. I think it is a new way of hearing – not filtering through the ears and brain, but hearing with the body. The baby swoops and jabs inside me as if it is conducting. I would like Robert to take my hand – so I could hear it through his body too.

  The next item is Caccia – the hunt. The boys mimic the sound of the horns, barking dogs and the flight of the deer. The conductor is flushed with exertion. I notice Stan Hercules, sitting in the row in front of us, leaning forward in his chair urgently as if he is riding a horse. Then a bizarre rendition of Valtzing Matilda sung in strange lisping English as if their mouths are full of bees. It is clear they sing for sound alone untroubled by the reality of zwagman, villabongs, or yumbuks.

  In one corner of the stage a soccer ball rocks slightly. As the boys go offstage they dribble it to the dressing room and then back again. Tricky – to dribble in a crinoline. The program reports that the boys have won many cups for singing and some for soccer. They beat the New Zealand Baptist Boys’ team six nil. They are also keen collectors. One boy has a suitcase full of bath chains and plugs he is planning to take home as keepsakes, and together they save silver paper from all of the chocolates they have eaten on tour. The collection is so large and impressive they hope to sell it on their return to Vienna.

  ‘Mutti, Mutti,’ chirrups the smallest boy in the final vesper. The mothers of the audience sigh a collective sigh and fold their arms across their chests. To be so far from home, so far from a loving mother to smooth your golden hair.

  The applause is uproarious. The conductor, Herr Georg Glebber, a thin man with impressive muttonchop whiskers, takes centre stage to address the audience.

  ‘It is a delight for us to sing for you – noble farmers of Australia. When we sing we give the air a sound. Simple science. We trap the air into a vessel, the body, and let it out again. To travel here today we come through the wheat and oatses. I tell the boys to put their heads out windows and breath. The air is so thin and so dry it makes in my boys such nice music, yar?’

  Glebber bows as we break into applause once again. The concert is called to a close and people file next door to the supper room. Iris has brought Anzac biscuits on our behalf. The boys mingle amongst us, expert at sliding through the crowds to congregate around the supper table. There are vanilla slices toppling sideways from an excess of yellow custard, and lamingtons as thick as housebricks.

  Iris looks wistfully at the boys, some still in their white knee stockings and ornately buckled court shoes. ‘Like little dolls, aren’t they, Jean? Wouldn’t you like one to take home? Imagine him sitting up on the windowsill warbling away like a bird.’

  The conductor is standing behind us. Iris turns and smiles at him. He clucks his tongue. ‘Ah. They look for marzipan, everywhere – Wellington, Auckland, Sydney, they look for marzipan. But no luck!’

  We laugh. Iris introduces herself to the conductor and then steers him towards Robert.

  ‘Mr Glebber, Mr and Mrs Pettergree. Mr Pettergree is our local wheat scientist.’

  Glebber cocks his head at Robert.

  ‘Ah. So you are the Herr Mendel of Australia. What a life, eh? Peas and celibacy!’ Glebber winks at me theatrically. ‘Do you know in my country Herr Mendel is reaching back into fashion?’

  Robert shakes his head.

  ‘He advocated pure breeding to keep constancy of type in the plant. We find that the same is true for the human. Look at my boys, eh, no hybrids, good breeding. All one race – like your wheat, Mr Pettergree.’ Glebber reaches out to shake Robert’s hand.

  ‘Excuse me but coffee I must find, something you Australians do not understand at all.’

  Robert nods at Glebber and watches Iris direct him towards the urn.

  ‘He sounds like Mr Talbot on sheep breeding. Surely he isn’t right?’

  ‘About Mendel or about coffee?’

  ‘Mendel, of course.’

  Robert frowns. ‘He’s wrong about Mendel but he’s right about eugenics. Why would you want to risk defects if you can breed them out?’

  I place my hand on my belly. We both turn to look again at the boys around the supper table. They are so handsome and confident, speaking in their guttural German, wishing for marzipan. There was a nervous moment at the beginning of the concert when it looked like they might salute. We waited anxiously for the outstretched Nazi arms but instead they coyly interlaced their fingers and started to swing them from side to side.

  ‘But what about the baby, Robert? We will still love this baby even if it isn’t perfect – won’t we?’

  Before he can answer Iris bustles up and hands me a cup of tea. ‘I can’t stop thinking about Mozart. How he wrote that beautiful music before this country had even been discovered. Imagine that – this whole country just sitting here empty while the rest of the world was listening to opera. How are we ever going to compete with that?’ she
says.

  Stan Hercules joins us. He tells Iris that the whole thing is an unnatural caper – that boys wearing dresses and screeching like girls is against the proper order.

  Two of the choirboys dart past us chasing a skink. It hugs the skirting boards, frantically looking for an escape.

  Prime Minister Menzies is in Colac when war is declared in Europe. ‘Australians are a British people,’ he says, ‘fitted to face the crisis with cheerful fortitude and confidence,’ then he returns, quickly, to the city.

  The Mozart Vienna Boys’ Choir is stuck behind enemy lines. An old army van takes Herr Georg Glebber to the Tatura Internment Camp for Aliens along with many Italians and others with questionable backgrounds. But what of the little vessels – Frederick, Otto, Olaf, Leopold, Gustav, Hans and the others? It is reported in the papers that they are in limbo. Iris nabs me at the grocer’s. She’s thinking of taking one, perhaps a small one, but she’s worried about the language problem and the difference in ‘customs’. She does feel some sort of responsibility, though, some sort of connection with them since we attended the concert.

  Rescue comes from Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne, who sacks his cathedral choir and installs the boys at St Patrick’s. Local families offer to billet them – pleased to help out for a few months.

  Robert and I listen to the wireless for two days and two nights on end, but there is little real news. We are at war again. Robert says it will be over quickly – perhaps even before the baby is born.

  — 23 —

  FIRE

  Robert and Bill Ivers burn the stubble together. It’s neighbourly. They do it at night when it’s pitch black outside but the flames light up the house all orange and smoky.

  ‘You’re ripening up nicely, love,’ Bill says when he comes in for a glass of water. His face is covered with soil and trickled with sweat lines. He leaves brown fingermarks on the glass.

  ‘Hot out there,’ he says.

  ‘Hot in here too.’

  ‘That’d be right.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll come in for a drink?’ I ask.

  Bill brushes a burnt wheat stalk off his trouser leg and looks out into the night. ‘Hard to tell.’

  They burn at night as the wind is low and the flames won’t get away. They light the fires with kerosene tins fitted with a bent pipe and a burning rag at the end. When a rag is extinguished they hold the heads of the lighters together to transfer the flame. I watch them from the back step. They look like puppeteers making two long-necked birds embrace. The fires follow the path left by the harvester in long strips – eating up the scraps. They burn low in some places, high and bright in others as the plant sugars ignite and fizz.

  Robert’s been out a while so I pour him a jug of water. I leave my apron hooked over the handle on the back door and duck under the fence. I walk across the dirt towards the burning paddocks. The sky and the land meet in blackness, only the running streams of fire marking one from the other.

  I jump over three low lines of fire – choosing the point where it burns lowest. Some of the water spills from the jug and splashes down my thighs. Three fires in front of me now, three behind. I can see Robert just up ahead, holding the lighter. My dress sticks to my legs and I peel it free. I’m looking for the low spot in the next fire, getting ready to jump again, when a sharp pain grips me. A hot metal belt is being tightened around my hips. I drop the jug and bend over the pain. It feels like flesh peeling away. I call out but my voice is lost in the noise of the fires. The pain sharpens. I fall over, kicking with my legs trying to get out from under it. The jug lies next to my hip, the water drunk instantly by the warm soil.

  I am spilling over too – flowing into the soil. Blood seeps from between my legs. I don’t know how long I lie like this, then Robert is in front of me and he’s saying oh Jesus, oh Jesus, over and over again and picking me up and half dragging and half carrying me. One leg dangles too low through a line of fire and my shoe starts to smoulder. Bill runs up with a blanket and smothers it. He tries to drape the blanket over me but it falls. I see it fall in a heap on the soil. I reach my hand out to it. It will be so heavy to wash, I think, I will never get the blood out of it.

  Robert slides me onto the back seat of the car, Bill drives. It feels like we are in Gone with the Wind, escaping with the glow of the burning ruins behind us. Robert strokes my hair with one hand and holds my shoe with the other.

  ‘Not long now,’ he says. ‘Not long now.’ But his hands are shaking and he’s trying not to look at the blood.

  Ten days later when I am home from hospital and fed up with bed rest and visits from Elsie, I retrieve the blanket and the jug from the paddock. Some of the fires still smoulder but it looks different in the daylight. I try to find the place, the exact place, where I lay and bled.

  At six months a stillborn baby is wrapped and disposed of – I don’t know where. But I do know that a baby is more than its body, it is fluid too and the meaty surrounds that gave it life. Some of the baby is in the paddock where I lay and bled. I look for a stain – a sign – but it must all have soaked away. In a few months the cultivator will come through. A few more months and the ground will be hidden again under the wheat.

  I touch my belly. It is still loose – this cannot be explained by science. Archimedes said when a person gets out of the bath the levels will go back to normal – no more displacement. But not with this. With this when everything is measured and taken away nothing will be the same again.

  I meet my baby in the night. My dream baby exists in a hazy state as if behind a window painted with glue. I have to strain to make out her features. Dream baby is baby-sized, but old. Her neck is lined and she is very thin. She has the face of someone waiting for the end of life, not the beginning. But as I struggle to make out her features I think, each night, she is getting a little younger. I think that if she were back inside me again her liquid gestation in the waters of my body would grow her young again, make her plump and fresh and new. Except that this would be in ideal conditions, not in the conditions of the Mallee.

  I write to Mary about the baby. Although it is hard to find the words. There is just the born and the unborn. There are no words for someone caught in between. She came too soon, I say. There was something of the monkey about her. She was so soft. The flesh of her arm melted under my touch like butter. She was both too young and too old. Her chin was sharply pointed. She was too tired to open her tiny eyes to me. For the first time in my life I wanted my mother.

  I draw Mary a map of the paddocks around the house. I mark the place that I fell in early labour and the place where Folly was set alight near the river. I tell Mary that Robert is in great pain about the baby. I can see that this is true although he cannot talk to me or even hold me for fear, I think, of being overwhelmed. I wish Mary love and happiness. I say that I’m sure she can talk her George around and put paid to his ridiculous ideas about going to the war.

  Results from the

  1940 Harvest

  The sample size is smaller as some farmers have switched to flax due to wartime demand. This year’s bushel weight of 44 lbs is low. Although economic factors have improved, environmental ones have not.

  In accordance with standard sampling procedure a portion of FAQ (fair-average-quality) wheat was critically examined and subjected to analysis and a milling test in the experimental flourmill.

  The sample is heavily rust-infected and shows evidence of bunt and stinking smut. The grains are small but of a constant size. Their appearance is not unpleasing.

  The percentage of native grass seeds is high. Moisture content and protein content are low.

  Test Baking

  Purpose: To measure the quality of wheats grown by Mr R.L. Pettergree of Wycheproof in regard to high yields of good-coloured flour with superior baking quality.

  Quality Tests: The Pelshenke figure, which indicates gluten quality (time taken for dough ball to expand under water at temperature; time divided by protein content = quality),
is below that which can be recorded. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender’s Farinograph and Fermentograph shows extremely poor flour quality with little gas-producing power.

  — 24 —

  THE ONE-IN, ALL-IN TRAIN BRINGS WAR TO THE MAN-ON-THE-LAND

  An advertisement on the front page of the Ensign catches our attention:

  The One-In, All-In Train will stop at Wycheproof on 14th and 15th May 1940. Take a few minutes out from your busy schedule to view the impressive displays. See modern weapons of war:

  1 Tank. Light. Mark VI

  1 4 Wheel Drive Ford V8 with guns

  1 Clectrac with medium artillery

  1 Trench Mortar

  2 Flame Throwers

  1 Field Gun

  Also many large-scale models depicting the new scientific warhorses of the RAAF, AIF and Navy and special displays for women from the Australian Defence League.

  All men aged 18–35 are encouraged to attend. Men of the country – Australia Calls – will YOU answer? Are you going to wait till Nazi tanks roll up Australian beaches or Axis planes smash your mother’s home? Don’t deceive yourself – you’ll be too late then. The War is rushing closer to Australia every day. Go out to meet it now!

  On the afternoon of the 15th the Matron-in-Chief will conduct the preliminary medical examination of local enlistees in Car 2.

  In the same issue of the Ensign there is a reprinted article on the military might and sophistication of the New Zealand Army. According to the article for the first time ever an army is giving consideration to the mental capacity of its recruits. Men who front to enlist are given a comprehensive intelligence test. Only then are they spread across different units of the army to provide the best possible mix of intelligence and strength.